Totally thought GGP was referring to Linus Torvalds

It is quite unlikely that Intel was actually inspired by Linus of LinusTechTips. He's exaggerating for dramatic effect, just like the fake drama of not being able to find his RAM.

Persistent memory is something that Intel has been working on for at least 5 years (https://github.com/pmem), and given that that's the public face of the software side of it, they were likely starting to develop the hardware even earlier.