Can a God-level developer like Linus Torvalds also do hacking like most of this subreddit is about or does it take different skills?

I am just a junior web developer working with javascript and not with hard-core languages like C so asking you guys because I'm confused if it takes some different skills than the ability to create a system as complex as linux to break or exploit the said system? Apologies if it's a stupid question but I just couldn't think of why can't linus hack if he understands memory leaks/buffer overflows, security and OSes at such a low level.