Right... Except he was doing it alone in his basement with difficulty 1. I fail to see the difference between such mining and pre-mining.
He was doing it with his fellow early adopters with an appropriate difficulty for the time.
Pre-mined currencies have always failed. XRP will be no different. Ripple as a concept will succeed, but XRP will not. Don't invest any more than you can afford to lose.
That's more of a world view than an argument, so I guess there is no need to respond to that. We will see.
It's backed up by history.