Diamonds Are Forever

About this episode

This episode explores the history and manipulation of the diamond market, detailing key figures and events that shaped its narrative.

For most of human history, diamonds were genuinely rare. Then in 1867, on a sheep farm near the Orange River in South Africa, a fifteen-year-old boy picked up a shiny pebble that turned out to be a 21-carat diamond. Within a few years, the world's diamond supply had multiplied beyond anything the markets had ever seen. By every law of supply and demand, the price should have collapsed. It didn't. And the reason it didn't is one of the most successful, sustained, and openly documented market manipulations in modern history.In this episode, Brian traces the full arc, from Cecil Rhodes consolidating the South African mines into De Beers in 1888, to the Oppenheimer family running the cartel for three generations, to the 1947 night a young copywriter named Frances Gerety scrawled four words on a piece of paper that would rewrite the meaning of marriage across two continents. We get into the secret deal with the Soviet Union, the vaults full of stones nobody was allowed to see, Edward Jay Epstein's blistering 1982 Atlantic exposé, the conflict-diamond catastrophe in Sierra Leone, and the lab-grown technology that has, in roughly a decade, taken the cartel's century-old story and broken…

Topics covered

• diamond industry
• market manipulation
• history of diamonds
• supply and demand
• conflict diamonds
• lab-grown diamonds

Keywords

• diamonds
• Cecil Rhodes
• De Beers
• market manipulation
• conflict diamonds
• lab-grown technology
• Frances Gerety
• Oppenheimer family

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: De Beers, Soviet Union

Places: Sierra Leone, South Africa

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