he's getting that much money because his project looks interesting, that is what most developpers want, so they are willing to take the risk

now other language designers need to learn from this project

keep your language simple, keep dependency list tiny, make clean syntax, focus on efficiency and small file size, and you win patrons

but people often then bloat their project, with uneeded features, that makes language harder to read, and harder for tooling to support it

edit:

i love Zig, i'm not using it, but i plan to once package manager is ready and vscode plugin with autocomplete and debugging is available

please make it happen, open bounties if you can't