As much as I like their work, I'd say they're probably a younger, next-generation, Satoshi-like, innovator.  Also, there seems to be a slight difference in approach and methodology.  Qora (the project) doesn't have a whitepaper and Qora (the dev) just dived head-first into the coding, whereas Satoshi started with the whitepaper and the code came later.  Qora is as awesome, like Satoshi, but I suspect the connection ends there.