Of course he did. Smart contracts had been floating around for a while. And that's why he included all those operators in the Bitcoin scripting language which then had to be disabled early on because their security & resource consumption were totally unpredictable.

There's an argument that Satoshi is Nick Szabo, the person who invented the term 'smart contract'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract

> The phrase "smart contracts" was coined by Nick Szabo in 1996, and reworked over several years. Szabo's first publication, "Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Free Markets" was published in Extropy #16,[3] and then later reworked as "Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks."[4]

I doubt it: he explicitly denied it in a blog post, and it's not clear how good he is at programming and system design (for all that he's obviously smart). More speculatively, I kind of doubt his personality as shown by his writing is that compatible with maintaining Nakamoto's personality as shown by theirs.

Also, your prior shouldn't be too high: although Szabo is well-known from his writings now, they didn't come out of nowhere. He previously worked for Agorics, Inc., which was founded to develop these ideas: https://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.htm... which I think of as more fundamental than Szabo's smart-contracts paper. (Admittedly I never finished slogging through that one.) If you think of smart contracts as emerging from nowhere then it probably seems more likely for Nick Szabo to be the lone genius behind it all.