He's not paying that much in practice. But even if he did, you couldn't hire 3 engineers (I'm assuming you'd get 3x 133k each) that could do this work in anywhere close to this amount of time. It would be a multi-month long project. So "to do this work" is not really comparable.
It was an experiment. Memes are literally in the motivation. The approach and timescales would look very different if he approached it as the main project in the company. So I wouldn't take the current timescales as a reliable description of anything.
