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.