That is quite amusing, but $10M is peanuts to Apple for some necessary patent licenses.
peanuts now, but peanuts then?
Yeah, even in 2007 Apple was a huge success already. Worth about $200 billion at the time, was earning about $3.5 billion a year in profit, and had $15 billion cash on hand.
It might not have been fully BS; as the parent commenter mentions, having a paper trail might have been an intentional strategy to try to discourage Jobs from going forward with it.