Not really. It's possible they could, but in practice they cannot. Creating a billion dollar company requires a good idea, good timing, and a lot of luck, the engineers are the least important part.
More than that it takes things like the right social connections, strong marketing, insight into customer demand, infrastructure spend, etc. You can't normally just convert engineering effort into profit in the way implied.
Not really. It's possible they could, but in practice they cannot. Creating a billion dollar company requires a good idea, good timing, and a lot of luck, the engineers are the least important part.