Well, it “inspired” Linux because Linus was unhappy with Minix. Linus wanted UNIX and Minix was not what he was looking for. I don’t think emulating Minix itself was ever his goal. He chose the Minix file system originally but this was just pragmatic as that is what his drive was formatted with.
The earliest versions of Linux were written on Minix though. Credit where credit is due.
Interestingly, Linus was unaware of BSD. He has said that, if he had known about it, he may never have written Linux to begin with.
The whole flame war between the two is worth a read [1], at least for historical reasons; very different points of view. And while Linus disagreed with Tanenbaum's POV, I Tanenbaum's criticism to Linux made it actually better.
My favorite thing about that whole thread is the unanimous consensus among everyone involved that we will all be running GNU/Hurd in 2 years so these stopgap OSes are just academic hobbies.
IIRC the very first installations of Linix started with Minix as a base, that then was "patched" into Linux. So it was more than just the filesystem. But yes, Torvalds wasn't happy with Minix, and Tanenbaum wasn't happy with Linux.
The earliest versions of Linux were written on Minix though. Credit where credit is due.
Interestingly, Linus was unaware of BSD. He has said that, if he had known about it, he may never have written Linux to begin with.