He's not paying that much in practice. But even if he did, you couldn't hire 3 engineers (I'm assuming you'd get 3x 133k each) that could do this work in anywhere close to this amount of time. It would be a multi-month long project. So "to do this work" is not really comparable.

He already said it was a multi-month project that used multiple models. So it feels very comparable to hiring multiple humans for multiple months.