Especially as he had been interested in programming, and the programming is the area where you can literally make a LOT of money in just a couple years while gaining the experience and gaining much better cred than childhood SAT.

What salary level is good enough evidence for you to consider someone clever?

Notice that your criteria for impressive cleverness excludes practically every graduate student -- the vast majority make next to nothing, have few "concrete" things to show off, etc.

My impression is that he's a spoiled 'math prodigy' who didn't really study anything beyond fairly elementary math, and my impression is that it's his own impression except he thinks he can do advanced math with little effort using some intuition while i'm pretty damn skeptical of such stuff unless well tested.

Except the interview you quoted says none of that.

JB: I can think of lots of big questions at this point, and I’ll try to get to some of those, but first I can’t resist asking: why do you want to study math?

EY: A sense of inadequacy.

[...]

[EY:] Even so, I was a spoiled math prodigy as a child—one who was merely amazingly good at math for someone his age, instead of competing with other math prodigies and training to beat them. My sometime coworker Marcello (he works with me over the summer and attends Stanford at other times) is a non-spoiled math prodigy who trained to compete in math competitions and I have literally seen him prove a result in 30 seconds that I failed to prove in an hour.

This is substantially different from EY currently being a math prodigy.

[EY:] I’ve come to accept that to some extent [Marcello and I] have different and complementary abilities—now and then he’ll go into a complicated blaze of derivations and I’ll look at his final result and say "That’s not right" and maybe half the time it will actually be wrong.

In other words, he's no better than random chance, which is vastly different from "[thinking] he can do advanced math with little effort using some intuition." By the same logic, you'd accept P=NP trivially.