I met him when he was doing a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle in 2004. He was an undergrad at UC Berkeley then, was doing the self-driving motorcycle, and had a successful startup selling a large folding tablet computer for viewing engineering drawings at construction sites. He does seem to get a lot done.
Clearly he is a brilliant man. Too bad that he got so greedy. This is doubly sad when he was already a legitimate multimillionaire from his job at Google.
I believe the commenters who say he's very smart and very driven.
But I'd also suggest that setting up small companies isn't THAT much work. Funneling other people's designs to those companies isn't THAT much work either.
Surely, the scheming took time and effort and I'm not saying he wasn't working hard. But the scheming described doesn't exactly sound like a superhuman feat for the ages.