The timing's interesting on this one. The blog post is from 19th June 2010; Chris Lattner says he started working on Swift in July 2010, "with only a few people knowing of its existence", but presumably with some approval from higher-ups.
I made a separate bet, saying that "they're working on a new language with these characteristics". For four years, this was an insane idea, they're not going to go all that trouble just to chuck Objective-C, I was mad and should be ignored. This week, that line of dismissal argument changed into "in hindsight, he was only stating the painfully obvious and anyone could have done that", which is nice and weird and a reversal fit for Steve Jobs.
That said, both Siracusa and I completely missed ARC, which is basically probably what made Swift worthwhile.