That's what I figured when I read the article, but his math is still off. If there's a 0.00006% chance of success, that's roughly 1 in 2 million. So your average expected payoff would be $1B/2M = $500. Divide by 3, and it's $166/founder, or $40/year.

His math is very suspect in the first place, because 1 in 2 million is roughly what you'd get if you divide the number of billion-dollar exits by the population of the U.S. That's an odd way to slice it; if you want something more representative of an individual person's odds, you're better off dividing the number of billion dollar exits by the number of companies started that believe they have a shot at a billion dollars (which might be in the tens to hundreds of thousands, but certainly not 2 million), and then you end up with figures roughly equivalent to his AEPs, but that ignores that many of those founders are college or grad students and the outcome is getting that job at Google after all.