To get the principal engineer behind the languages Turbo Pascal, Object Pascal (Delphi) and then C# and TypeScript that seems like the deal of the century if you factor the business value of all of the above.
Indeed, and at the time I was surprised that they got him for so little. There's so many design decisions in C# that resemble Object Pascal and Turbo Pascal, that it's pretty obvious that Anders=C# (not to take anything away from what are surely some of the best compiler engineers in the last few decades, I just don't know their names off-hand).
As someone who programmed heavily in Delphi back in the day their absolutely are and it's one of the reasons I like C# so much, it feels like home.
So does TypeScript.
I also used all languages designed by Anders, his practical approach is clearly visible in all of them. Unfortunately there are just a few interviews with him but they are all high quality: https://www.artima.com/intv/anders.html
Which is hardly "getting rich" if you are as skilled as Anders Hejlsberg.
I’m pretty sure Anders’ salary at Microsoft qualifies him being called rich.
I think the GP assumed that Anders was already rich before that so joining Microsoft didn't 'get him rich'. But if that was the case, based on his work history he may have still 'gotten rich' via programming languages, just from before Microsoft.
I think GP is saying that $1M isn't enough money to "get rich", and furthermore isn't particularly "for creating a language", for someone who could easily make $200K-$1M working on whatever Microsoft wants.
But GP forgot that the $1M was in 1997, before Google and Facebook and friends made non-founder engineers rich.
Netscape?
By that standard, I would guess that Chris Lattner did OK when joining Tesla.