Market Orders soak up all the liquidity as they need to be executed at the best price available. So, if the price is at $10 and I dump a huge amount of shares, it will go through the bids..$10, $9.9, $9.8...you get the idea.
Limit Orders kind of provide liquidity. It doesn't execute unless a certain condition is met. So I can dump a large sell at $10, it won't change the price. Anyone in the market can bid into $10 and buy shares if they want.
So, trading volume doesn't matter, order type matters. If Bezos had dumped his shares in open market it would cause the price to change dramatically. People will take it as a sign and jump out like rats fleeing a sinking ship.
Most of these trades are pre-planned and are limit orders.
The data has not been updated for the November sells you can see all the Amazon insider trades here (including the March selling noted in the article): http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/amzn/insider-trades
Most are automatic sell and are pre planned. Disposition are trades which are off market transaction, selling or buying, directly with the company.
Conversely if I place a $1B sell order for $1100 (ought to be close to what happened here) the price cannot rise above $1100 until that amount of money has been extracted out of the market.
That should not prevent the price from falling with such an order.
And so it's no big deal the day it actually happens.
So to do that right, you get on the phone with broker who agrees to buy such quantity. You put order SELL at $5 and 1,000,000 shares ONLY, which means noone can buy just 10 shares: you take 1MM or none. Once your call reach the market, within seconds the other party puts a BUY call at 1,000,000 shares. 10 seconds later the whole transaction is done. It doesn't affect market at all, because the price fluctuates based on supply and demand. In our scenario X of supply met X of demand immediately, so the market didn't tick. Of course such large volume might be some sort of a signal (buy or sell, depends on party that looks at it), but will not trigger serious movement of stock, immediately.
If it's obviously a loophole to you and me, then what do you imagine the SEC think?
This happens all the time when the big boys want to open/close/rebalance large positions within a short time frame.