The article says "I ended up having 26 interviews and meetings (of course I kept a log) with various AI tech giants."

I don't think that indicates that any one company interviewed him 20+ times.

Seriously. I would expect him to be more of an offer-only scenario.

He's summing interviews across all AI giants. But the ones about to IPO can interview someone almost infinitely many times, because everyone wants on the bandwagon.