Well, this is one of the major risks associated with using bitcoin. With a simple mistake, one can lose all in a twinkle of an eye. One of the most effective precautive measures in keep your bitcoin safe is to keep your wallet keys as safe as possible. One method I employed is to make copies of each of my wallet keys and keep them safe. That way, I can always recover it even if one got lost or missing.
I sincerely do hope he is able to recover the coins because that's a whole lot of money to lose .
This is the thing, you do not need to actually have to face those risks as long as you have several copies of your keys or your seed words lying around in the case you happen to make a mistake.
Obviously this kind of stories are terrible and they are being used to try to discourage people to adopt bitcoin but all of this could have avoided by doing something as simple as a paper backup that takes less than a minute to make and now this person is going to regret this, as it does not matter how rich you are losing that much money for no reason at all is always going to be painful.