I would bet good money that if you told Linus in late 1991 that he’d spend his entire career working on his “side project” and that it would be the major OS powering many billion and even trillion dollar new tech companies, and running on several billion battery powered and wireless networked pocket supercomputers in 2021 - and that he’d be some sort of software industry messiah - he’d have laughed at you (and probably viciously evicerated you on a public mailing list for your stupidity, like he is wont to do...)