He's making it sound that way, although he might plausibly deny that by claiming he just doesn't want to speculate publicly.

Either way he must have known people would read it like you did when he wrote that; so we can safely assume it's boasting at the very least.

I don't think he is saying that. As I said in my other comment here I think he is just drawing a potential parallel to other historic work that was done in a private(secret) domain. The larger point is we simply don't know so it's best to act in a way that even if it hasn't been done already it certainly seems like it will be broken. Hence the move to Post-Quantum Cryptography is probably a good idea!

It is more, many companies can't do what they claim to do, or they have done it once at best and had no more consistency. I sense most companies in the quantum computing space right now are of this ilk. As someone that works in academic and private quantum computing research, repeatability and methodology are severely lacking, which always rings alarm bells. Some companies are funded off the back of one very poor quality research paper, reviewed by people who are not experts, that then leads to a company that looks professional but behind the scenes I would imagine are saying Oh shit, now we actually have to do this thing we said we could do.

Just you

I ran it through ROT13, base64, reversed the bits, and then observed it....The act of decoding collapsed it into ...not imminent...