With every halfway decent engineer you personally know, go compete in a major competition he won by himself in his early 20s and then repeat your statement. The archives are all online, take your time.
I'm probably biased because I competed in those competitions in college and do know some people who did very well (though of course not as well as him). He's definitely a > 99th percentile RE and hacker, to be sure. I was just talking about raw cognitive ability, but he absolutely may very well be > 99th percentile there as well.