Luxury is engineered. We show you the engineering.
A diamond is carbon, the fourth most abundant element in the universe. However, for most of the last century, a diamond has been the single most reliable symbol of luxury. That gap is not an accident. It was built and engineered.
In Part 1 of our two-part opening story, we trace the history of the diamond business from the (literal) ground up. We start a thousand years before Cecil Rhodes ever reached Africa, with the Indian riverbeds that supplied almost every diamond in human history, and the Jewish merchant networks that ran from Lisbon to Amsterdam to London and turned valuation expertise into the most durable asset in the trade.
We follow the first great supply shock: Brazil, in the 1720s. When prices collapsed and the Portuguese responded by manufacturing the provenance of diamonds three hundred years before anyone thought to use the phrase.
Then comes South Africa. A pebble some farm kids were playing with, in 1867. 50,000 people camped in the Northern Cape within three years to get their fair share. Until a hole in the ground dug entirely by hand that produced more diamonds than the previous two millennia combined. Geology switched sides — and the entire pricing architecture of the trade was suddenly at risk of collapse.
What follows is a corporate war. A monopoly built on ownership has a flaw. Along the way one of its many formidable leaders figures something out: the only way to increase the value of diamonds is to reduce production. Rhodes thought control was a deed. Oppenheimer worked out that control is a spigot — half a century before OPEC.
Chapter markers & show notes
(0:00) Cold open — Nobody knows De Beers. Everybody knows diamonds.
(2:17) Are diamonds actually rare? — Carbon is the fourth most abundant element in the universe. Rubies and emeralds are scarcer.
(2:59) India and the three bathtubs — Alluvial riverbeds, and the total volume ever found before the 18th century.