No one said that. At the time there was a massive gaping hole in the OS market begging to be filled. OS vendors were gouging everyone, and GNU/Hurd kept experiencing delays.

It’s like saying “Zuckerberg and Gates dropped out of school so why shouldn’t I?”.

Chances of replicating Linux success are as big as chances of being next Zuckerberg.

Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but align your expectations.

And most importantly, as OP said - it’s pet project. Success isn’t a goal.

Version 6 Unix was about 9000 lines of code; the first version of Linux was something similar. Firefox has 27 million lines of code. Linux has about that now, too, which is why one reason you don't see grad-school Linus #2 writing an OS and getting traction.

Did he write a blog post (or newsgroup post) in advance of writing the first version? I'm all for pet project tinkering, but seems strange to publicly make a pronouncement before starting. There's no "news" here, why is it on the front page?