Source
Adam Lashinsky, "Amazon's Jeff Bezos: The Ultimate Disrupter," Fortune, November 16, 2012 (December 3, 2012 issue)
Editorial Note
Amazon's founder is very widely credited with this maxim, and the attribution is well grounded even if no primary source carries it. The earliest documented appearance is journalist Adam Lashinsky's December 2012 Fortune cover story, "Amazon's Jeff Bezos: The Ultimate Disrupter," which calls it "a favorite Bezos aphorism" while contrasting Amazon's razor-thin margins with Apple's premium pricing. Reporting has consistently described Bezos deploying the line in negotiations — the Financial Times noted in 2014 that he "has been known to tell suppliers in meetings" exactly this — capturing his strategy of undercutting competitors who cling to fat profits. What we could not find is a primary source in Bezos's own hand or voice: it does not appear verbatim in his collected shareholder letters, in the speeches and writings gathered in Invent and Wander, or in any published transcript, and even the Fortune piece never pins it to a specific dated remark. We therefore treat it as authentically attributed to Bezos but not verifiable to an original, and its exact wording rests on secondary press rather than a document he authored.