The thing is, sometimes deals do happen exactly as the article describes. Most of the time, most business deals work as you say: slow and methodical and/or based on relationships built up over time. However, it's not unreasonable to believe that things went down pretty much as the post described.

Consider that a million dollars to either Steve or Jeff back in the late 90's was rounding error. Also, consider the history of the one-click patent[1]

So let's say that Steve and Jeff hadn't ever met or talked before. Steve is in a discussion with people at Apple and the subject of one-click comes up and Steve thinks 'we need that!'. Not having Jeff's number, Steve gets Amazon's main number off their web site calls and says 'This is Steve Jobs... I need to talk to Jeff'[2] Maybe the person at Amazon takes him at his word, maybe there's some verbal jousting involved, but after a few minutes he gets through to Jeff. Now they're on the line with each other and Steve pitches licensing the patent for Apple. Jeff says 'sounds good, let's do it.' [3] Now, at this point both of them probably hand things off to their staff and say 'get this done' and lots of activity occurs to dot the i's and cross the t's.

This is not outside the realm of possibility. For example, Warren Buffet is known to have done much larger deals with people he's never met in a surprisingly short period of time.[4] Sure, there's usually due diligence done[5] that is more drawn out during which the details are fleshed out. But an actual (large dollar) deal can get done (i.e. agreed to in principle) with less time/energy involved than many of us invest when spending a few hundred dollars.

So that's a very long-winded way of saying: for most people (i.e. hired guns) it doesn't work that way, but when you're the founder/owner it can if you want it to.

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[1] I'm not sure if you were around/paying attention when the one-click patent happened but there are a few things I remember: 1) it was not a very popular patent to many outside Amazon 2) it was not clear whether or not the patent was even valid 3) there was a lot of hand-wringing about if it was granted it should only be used for defensive purposes (i.e. that it might be fine to get it as a defense against patent trolls but that Bezos shouldn't try to monetize it.)

[2] Not unheard of or even out of character if you believe half the stories told about Steve like the time he supposedly walked into General Motors HQ for an impromptu meeting with their then CEO, Roger Smith... who took the meeting. Reasons why he might take this kind of meeting range from 'I'm bored.. why not' to 'the balls on this guy... this should be good for a laugh' to 'this guy might be a good contact to have down the road.' Also, if you've ever worked for a 'don't you know who I am?' kind of boss, this type of behavior is entirely believable at face value as you've likely lived it.

[3] Maybe Jeff is thinking that having Apple endorse the patent strengthens it and that's a good thing, maybe he thinks that the patent is a dead end and Steve's offering some easy money so what the hell, maybe he's looking at the bigger picture in terms of developing a deeper relationship with Apple. Who knows, but he has several potential motivations.

[4] http://fortune.com/2016/11/02/warren-buffett-berkshire-hatha...

[5] Except when it's not. Like back when eBay 'bought' Skype... except they forgot the IP which was the valuable part. Or Theranos. Or Madoff. etc. etc.