Has Linus ever really failed? It's pretty amazing how young he was to have developed the Linux kernel, in comparison to other open source authors (like creator

Has Linus ever really failed? It's pretty amazing how young he was to have developed the Linux kernel, in comparison to other open source authors (like creators of Perl/Python/Ruby/etc. who were at least a decade older). I read his biography "Just For Fun" and it says he basically spent his entire childhood messing with computers. But it doesn't seem like he really failed as an adult. People like Andy Tanenbaum kept telling him he would fail -- i.e. the kernel would reach a point where complexity prevents further change, which is actually an extremely common failure mode for software. But with hindsight they were wrong.