The "text of the memo" is really just the article's author not understanding the context of Steve Yegge's years-later retelling, from which that text comes. "His Big Mandate went something along these lines" (Yegge's words right before the quoted text) doesn't even imply there was a singular 'memo' involved, and definitely (and obviously) wasn't meant to say that the text was actually what Bezos wrote. So the footnote "Whether or not it existed in this exact form" is unnecessarily ambiguous about whether these were Bezos' words. They're clearly not - besides Yegge not saying they are, they're a dead ringer for Yegge's style and not at all Bezos'.