What Makes Something Valuable? (Part One)

one story at a time. Throughout recorded history, humans have ascribed value to countless items. They become so coveted that accumulating them assures life changing wealth. I want to get Lucy some real pearls. I just love finding new places to wear.

silver also making unprecedented gains. Then a few days later, we heard an argument about, of all things, lab grown diamonds. One side insisted that they were nothing like their natural counterparts. The reasoning was straightforward. Lab diamonds may be chemically identical, but they're created in days, while natural diamonds take millions of years to form deep within the earth. That argument immediately brought to mind a scene from the movie Now You See Me, Now You Don't.

skyrocketing while natural diamonds are plummeting in price. It got us to wondering what makes something valuable. To find the answer, we're going to tell the story of Debier's, the multinational diamond company that built the most successful monopoly in modern history. Along the way. We'll hear from Kevin de Merritt, founder of Lear Capital, one of the largest precious metal firms

in the United States. When you strip away the romance, the marketing, and the carefully crafted illusions, the question of value becomes surprisingly difficult to answer. And what you discover again and again is that many of the things that humanity has prized most highly weren't naturally valuable at all. Their value was manufactured.

South African dirt. He bends down, brushes away the soil, and lifts the tiny rough stone in the palm of his hand to him. It just looks different. But little did he know that the stone in his hand is about to set off a chain reaction that will lead to one of the most powerful monopolies in human history, because what this laborer is holding is one of the rarest gems in existence, a diamond, and he found it on a farm that would come to be known as Debir's.

To understand the significance of this moment, we must go back way back to a time when diamonds were first recorded in human history. For most of human civilization, if you wanted a diamond, you had one place to go, India. For more than two thousand years, India was the only known source of diamonds on Earth. These durable stones came from the river gravels of a region called Golconda, and they were nothing like those found in the massive mines

of South Africa. They were any rare, hard, and almost impossible to get. Imagine this, hundreds of laborers standing waist deep in muddy rivers, scooping gravel into baskets, sifting and washing hour after hour, day after day, all for the chance that maybe one in tens of thousands of pebbles would flash back a hard, cold light that was a diamond. Prior to the eighteen hundreds, the entire world production of gem quality diamonds amounted to only a few pounds a year.

Their rarity gave them an instant mystique. They weren't just pretty stones. They were strange. They would scratch any other material. They were durable enough to where they didn't seem to wear down. Like gold, they didn't corrode, decay, tarnish, or degrade. And also, like gold, diamonds sparkle. They caught the light in a way other gems didn't. For early rulers and priests, they felt supernatural, so from the beginning, diamonds were never a normal luxury. They weren't like cloth or spices, or

even gold coins that passed from hand to hand. They were whispers from the gods, tiny pieces of indestructible light. In the ancient world, almost no one ever saw one. They were reserved for royalty, mystics and religious figures. Diamonds were mounted into idols, set into ceremonial weapons, or sown into robes that only the most powerful humans on earth would ever wear. And because they were small and extremely valuable,

they had another quality as well. They were portable. They could be sewn into a hem or slipped into a seam, providing the flexibility of carrying a small fortune in the lining of a cloak. Long before there was a phrase like stock portfolio, diamonds began to develop a second identity, not just as symbols of divine power, but as tiny,

portable storehouses of wealth. Because if something can't be concealed or carried in times of upheaval, it struggles to function as a long term store of value during times of stress. That's why gold and silver, coins and diamonds were considered valuable to refugees and land and factories were not. By the Middle Ages, those Indian diamonds had made their way west along the same trade routes that carried silk, spices

and porcelain. Muslim merchants baried them through Persia, and the levant Italian traders brought them to the courts of Europe. Little by little, diamonds began appearing in royal treasuries in France, England and the German States. But if you look at who handled them, who cut them, and who evaluated them, a pattern emerges. Many of the hands holding those stones belonged to Jews, and this was not by accident. Medieval Europe ran on a system of guilds. If you wanted

to be a carpenter, mason or goldsmith. You didn't just decide one day to open a shop. You joined a guild, a powerful fraternity of craftsmen that controlled training prices and who was allowed to work. Guilds weren't just labor unions. They were social clubs, religious institutions, and protection rackets all mixed together, and there was one basic rule. You had to be Christian. If you weren't Christian, if you were Jewish or any other faith for that matter, you were

locked out of most of the respectable trades. You couldn't become a master carpenter, you couldn't become a guild goldsmith. Your options shrank to a tiny list of professions that lay outside guild control. Two of those professions were money lending and gem polishing, and those turned out to be the perfect combination for diamonds. Christian doctrine at the time frowned on usury, or lending money at interest, so the Church pushed Christians away from the business of high interest lending.

But economies still needed loans. Kings, princes, and merchants. They all needed people willing to extend credit to expand an empire or go to war, or corner or market that vacuum was filled in large parts by the Jewish community. Money lending requires collateral. Something that holds value, is portable and can be redeemed in any major city. Land isn't practical for that livestock dies. But throughout history gold and silver fit that bill.

medieval Europe, diamonds had an added benefit. If you were Jewish in a Christian kingdom, your safety was never guaranteed. Edicts could be announced, crowds could turn, you could be expelled on a short notice from the place your family had lived for generations. In that world, wealth that can be moved overnight is more than just convenient, it's life saving. So diamonds served two roles at once, collateral for loans and an emergency vault. That could be stitched into your

clothing over generations that created expertise. Diamonds were not as fungible as gold or silver. Fungible, meaning one diamond gem couldn't just be traded for another of the same size, unlike a gold or silver coin that could be traded for another gold or silver coin of the same weight.

Diamonds come in different colors and qualities. Jewish traders and craftsmen, locked out of the guild system began developing a deep familiarity with these stones, how to evaluate them, how to cut them, how to move them quietly from one royal court to another. As one historian put it, by the early modern period, diamonds and Jewish communities had become intimately connected, and once that connection was established, it shaped the entire global diamond trade.

Lisbon and Antwerp became early hubs ports where Indian stones entered Europe, got evaluated and cut, then made their way into the crowns and jewelry boxes of kings and queens. Then history intervened. In fourteen ninety two, the Spanish monarchy issued the Alhambrad Decree expelling Jews from Spain. In Portugal, similar pressures followed across the Iberian world. Jewish communities faced

a simple choice convert or leave. Many left. When Jews were forced out of Lisbon and Antwerp, they carried their skills with them and their hand tools. A factory wasn't needed to cut diamonds. All that was needed was a bench, a wheel, and some powder, all of which could fit into a cart. So when those families resettled in Amsterdam, they didn't just start over, they remade the industry. Amsterdam

quickly became the new center of European diamond cutting. At the same time, the Dutch Republic was rising as a maritime power. Its great trading company, the Dutch East India Company, wanted direct access to Indian goods. Jewish merchants helped finance those voyages and in return secured their place in a lucrative trade. Soon Amsterdam replaced Lisbon as the main European portal for Indian diamonds. Stones came in on Dutch ships, got cut by Jewish craftsmen, and headed back out in

refined form into the royal courts of Europe. Then, in seventeen twenty five, the world caught a break. For centuries, people had worried that India was running out of diamonds. The trickle of stones was slowing, prices were rising. There was a real fear that diamonds, these symbols of indestructible wealth, might actually disappear. Then a discovery was made in an unlikely place. In the early seventeen hundreds, miners searching for

gold and Brazilian river beds started finding unfamiliar stones. They were hard, they scratched metal, They looked suspiciously like diamonds, or had got back to Europe. Tests confirmed it. The world had a second diamond source. For a while, Brazilian stones eased the pressure. European elites could keep buying, jewelers

could keep designing, but the geopolitical balance was shifting. By the mid eighteenth century, Britain dominated the seas, its navy controlled the shipping lanes, and as a result, its trading companies muscled their way into every profitable enterprise. So it's no surprise that Britain gradually took control of the diamond trade as well. London, not Amsterdam, became the new trading center for uncut stones, and once again the merchants followed.

Jewish diamond traders moved their operations to London, keeping their cutting factories in Antwerp, where labor and expertise were established, and shipped finished gems to royal courts across Europe. At the top of this ecosystem sat a small number of elite specialists, expert evaluators, and financers who became known as court Jews, trusted Jewish advisers who handled loans, jewels, and

delicate diplomacy for kings. In Sweden, this role was filled by the Isaac family, and Hamburg by the Lippolds, and in Vienna by the Oppenheimer's, a name that will hear again later in this story. By the late seventeen hundreds, Jewish traders controlled virtually the entire world of diamond traffic, but there was a problem they couldn't solve. The earth seemed to be running out of the shiny stone again, Brazilian production began to fade. India's supply was nearly exhausted

as well. By the eighteen sixties, it looked like the age of diamonds was coming to an end. Then a boy on the far tip of South Africa picked up a shiny rock and it changed everything. Life can be pretty stressful these days. You want to know what makes me feel better? Licorice from the Licorice Guy. Call me crazy,

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you love, and taste the difference. Welcome back to Red Pilled America. So as the eighteen seventies arrived, there was a problem that diamond trade couldn't solve. The earth seemed to be running out of the shiny stone. Brazilian production began to fade. Handhandlers sifting through the riverbeds were coming up dry. India's supply was nearly exhausted as well. By the eighteen sixties, it looked like the age of diamonds

was coming to an end. But then in eighteen seventy one, a mixed raced laborer was walking on a farm in the Northern Cape of South Africa when he saw a glint of light in the dirt. The property he was on belonged to two brothers, Dietereric and Johannes de Bier, ordinary Boer farmers who thought they owned pasture, not treasure. Unknown to the Deber brothers, an onslaught of diamond prospectors

had been flooding to their area. Four years earlier, a shepherd boy was walking on a farm near the Orange River, about eighty miles southwest of the Deber property when he found a shiny pebble in the dirt. He picked it up and took it home. His family treated it as a curiosity. Kids played with it. It got passed around like a toy. Eventually the stone found its way to a neighboring farmer, a man named Schok van Niekirk. He

had a good eye and a good memory. The stone reminded him of a rumor he'd heard about diamonds in far off lands. He decided to send it off for testing. After bouncing through several hands, it landed on the desk of a respected scientist in the Cape Colony of South Africa, who inspected it and tested its hardness. He finally issued his verdict. It was a diamond. The first major diamond recorded in South Africa. It would come to be known as the Eureka Diamond. Newspapers wrote a few small pieces

about this curious find. There was some local excitement, but it did not start a stampede. Many people still believed diamonds couldn't exist in Africa for centuries, they'd only come from the riverbeds of India and Brazil. A lone stone in the Cape felt like a freak accident, a geological fluke, but two years later that illusion died. In eighteen sixty nine, another shepherd was walking near the Orange River, but about twenty miles northeast of where the Eureka diamond was found,

when he noticed a peculiar stone. It was big, about eighty three and a half carrots. He wasn't sure what it was, but he figured it might be valuable, so he traded it away for five hundred sheep, ten oxen and a horse. And the buyer it was the same farmer that bought the shiny pebble two years earlier, Choke von Niekirk. Von nie Kirk, once again, sensing he was holding something special, passed the stone along to Cape town merchants, who sent it on to Europe. When it finally hit

the London market, the reaction was explosive. The stone sold for a staggering amount. It was then cut and polished into a glittering gem that became famous worldwide. It became known as the Star of South Africa. The sale sent a jolt through the diamond world. If a stone this large was pulled out of the ground in South Africa, that suggested something far more important than one lucky find. It suggested a new source of diamonds. Newspapers in Europe

and America seized on the story. Headlines shouted about a new diamond frontier. In an age obsessed with gold rushes and new worlds, the idea of an African diamond region was irresistible. Prospectors, fortune hunters, hustlers and drifters started packing their bags. They'd come from Britain, Germany, hall in Australia and the United States. They boarded ships for Cape Town, then treked inland under brutal conditions, heat, dust, disease, and

all the dangers of a colonial frontier. Which started as curiosity quickly became a phenomenon. The diamond rush had begun. Prospectors began combing through the Orange River and then the val River that fed it. But then something strange happened. In eighteen seventy one, a mixed race laborer found a shiny stone on the land of the De Beer Brothers, which was not near a river bed. This didn't completely

make sense. For centuries, diamonds were believed to originate in river beds because nearly all known stones from India and Brazil were recovered from river deposits. This belief was reinforced by the Eureka Diamond and the Star of the South, both found near river beds. People believed diamonds were somehow river related, but what they didn't know was that diamonds come from deep within the Earth's mantle, about sixty miles below the Earth's surface. Under extreme heat and pressure, carbon

atoms crystallized to form diamonds, a hard, durable gem. These diamonds are transported upward by rare volcanic eruptions through vertical conduits of magma that solidify into rock called kimberlight. Over millions of years, erosion breaks down this soft volcanic rock, releasing diamonds that are then carried and concentrated by rivers

into gravel. Beds. Rivers act as a kind of natural mind, digging into the earth, eroding the volcanic rock, eventually exposing the diamonds within the kimberlite pipe, then wiping away the soil. But by eighteen seventy one no one identified this process. So when that extrace laborer found a diamond on the De Beer brother's property property that was nowhere near a river, people were a bit shocked. Word of his findings spread to the prospectors on the valen Orange River. These diggers

followed the rumors, then followed each other. Soon men began drifting onto the de Beer property, scratching at the soil, digging experimental pits, sleeping in tents and makeshift shelters. At first it was a nuisance. Then it became a problem. These independent diggers began invading the De Beer farm outright, squatting on corners of the property, hammering stakes into the earth, declaring claims without permission. In the colonial legal system, miners

had powerful friends that de Beer brothers did not. They were not wealthy, they were not politically connected, they didn't have private armies, and they were up against a government that saw mining as progress and farming as an afterthought. So when a series of test pits on their land revealed some something staggering, a patch of diamond bearing ground called Kolsberg copy, there was nothing the de Beer brothers could do to stop what happened next.

sold larger parcels. As it became clear the invasion wasn't slowing down. Their property quickly became completely overrun. They walked away from it with what they could because men from all over the world were arriving to try their luck, and one of them was a sickly young Englishman with big ambitions. His name was Cecil Rhads. Rhodes was not supposed to be a Titan of industry. He was supposed to die young. Born in England in eighteen fifty three, Rhodes was a frail child with weak lungs and a

heart condition. His parents worried he wouldn't survive the British climate, so as a teenager they shipped him off to what they hoped would be a gentler place, the colony of Natal in southern Africa, where his older brother Herbert was trying to make it as a cotton farmer. The idea was simple, fresh air and light work would lead to maybe a few more years of life, but Cecil Roads had other ideas. In the mid eighteen seventies, word reached Herbert about diamonds being found far Inland on a farm

owned by two brothers named de Beer. Herbert staked out a few small claims, then he wrote to Cecil come quickly. Cecil, twenty somethings, sickly but intellectually sharp and wildly ambitious, decided to join the rush. He hired an ox wagon, loaded it with supplies, and set off on a grueling overland trek that would take weeks. When he finally arrived at the de Beer's former farm, he didn't find a quiet

piece of land. He walked into a frenzy. Prospectors discovered that, unlike diamonds found in riverbeds, the diamonds found on this and nearby properties weren't just on the surface. As they dug straight down into the dirt, diamonds were consistently The miners were slowly discovering that diamonds weren't a water phenomenon. They were found in pipes deep in the ground. Rhodes pitched his canvas tent on the edge of what used to be a small hill and looked out over a

sea of humanity. Tents jammed every open space, Smoke from cookfires hung low, Men shouted, cursed. Wheelbarrows carried rock, men dragged their digging equipment. The ground itself was being eaten, sliced into a giant open crater. As hundreds of adjacent claims descended in ragged steps towards the center. Rhodes wrote home to his mother, trying to describe what he was seeing. He told her to imagine.

Roads Like everyone else, began with a claim. He purchased a small plot on the former De Beer land and started digging. But he wasn't just a prospector. He was an observer. It didn't take him long to notice something crucial. A fortune could not only be found in the dirt It could also be found in the needs of the men digging it. Life in the Kimberly diggings was brutal. The African sun was merciless, The dust got into everything. Water was scarce and often foul. Food needed to be

brought in from long distances. Almost every comfort costs money. Rhodes watched the lines at the water. He saw how much men were willing to pay for a cold drink, a meal, and a basic tool. So he started small, importing ice cream and selling it to the exhausted diggers. He sold jugs of water at a profit. He became, in a sense, a miner of miners, and as he did, he noticed one more thing. Water was not just a

comfort issue. It was an engineering nightmare. The deeper the diggers got in their individual claims, the more they hit groundwater pits flooded, walls became unstable, collapses killed workers. Each claim owner needed two kinds of water solutions at once, fresh drinking water for laborers and a way to get rid of the water filling their pits.

It was an engineering nightmare. The deeper the diggers got in their individual claims, the more they hit groundwater pits flooded, walls became unstable, collapses killed workers. Each claim owner needed two kinds of water solutions at once, fresh drinking water for laborers and a way to get rid of the water filling their pits. Enter the steam pump.

the big Hole started to cave. Thousands of workers had to be pulled out With Ropes, claim owners were staring at financial ruin. There was only one machine capable of saving their pits, Rhades pump. He could now charge whatever he wanted. The money poured in. He reinvested his profits into more pumps from England. When his competitors tried to follow his lead and import similar equipment, he used every trick he could, undercutting, out, maneuvering, leveraging relationships to squeeze

them out. Before long, Roads had something new in Kimberly, a water pumping monopoly. If you wanted to keep your claim dry, you paid Cecil Roads, but some claim owners couldn't afford to pay in cash, so they paid him in shares. Over time, as more pits flooded and more owners fell behind, Rhodes began to accumulate slivers of ownership in dozens of claims. When a mine was in serious trouble,

he took it over outright. By the age of twenty seven, Cecil Rhodes was no longer just the sickly younger brother of a cotton farmer. He was one of the largest individual mine owners in Kimberly, and this was just the beginning. Despite the chaos of the Diggings, Rhades still dreamt beyond the pit. He had an almost mystical belief in the destiny of the British Empire. He wanted Britain to stretch

uninterrupted from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo. He even fantasized about one day bringing the United States back under the British Crown. To work on those ambitions and to cement his status, he returned to England to study at Oriel College, Oxford. He'd spend terms at the university absorbing the language and ideas of imperial philosophy, then would rush back to South Africa to keep an eye on his businesses. When he finally he decided to consolidate his holdings,

he did something symbolically powerful. He formed a new mining company and named it after the farm where he bought his first claim, the De Beers Mining Company. But Rhodes didn't just want a company. He wanted a kingdom with a corporate logo. So he went to London and applied to the British Colonial Office for something called a royal charter. In theory, a charter is just a legal document, a

grant from the Crown that recognizes a company. In practice, for a certain class of imperial corporations, it's a license to behave like a government. A royal charter can give a private company the power to build railroads and telegraph lines, and to treaties, annex and administered territories, raise its own police and even armed forces. The British had given charters like this to the companies that ruled whole swaths of

India and Africa. Now Cecil Roads wanted one for his mining enterprise, and in eighteen eighty he got it to be was no longer just a collection of claims in a muddy hole. It was a chartered company with quasi governmental powers, a corporate state embedded inside the British Empire. And Roads had even bigger plans because there was a problem looming on the horizon, too many diamonds.

They were no longer rare and couldn't be melted down and molded into coins that were identical to one another. Like gold and silver, Each gem diamond was different, Their value depended on scarcity and status. If the industry kept behaving like a free for all, this scarcity illusion would vanish and diamonds would never be considered rare again. Rhodes decided there was only one solution monopoly. The diamond business, he believed, must be controlled by a single hand, his hand.

Only a centralized authority could throttle supply, hold back production, and maintain the idea that diamonds were scarce and precious. But there was a problem. He was not the only king in Kimberly. Standing across from him was another empire builder, a man named Barney Barnado. Barnatto controlled the Kimberly Mine, one of the richest diamond pipes in the region. Roads through de Beers controlled other major mines, including the one

on the original de Beer farm. Between them, they sat on top of roughly ninety five percent of the world's diamond production. Whoever won this duel would control the global diamond market. Rhoades knew he couldn't win a straight fight with his own money. He needed deep pockets, someone with the capital and the appetite to bet on a monopoly, So he went to a banking dynasty that had already been quietly intertwined with the global gem trade for decades.

Cecil roads went to the Rothschilds. By the nineteenth century, the Rothschild family was a financial superpower. From their founding in Frankfort, they had built a network of banking houses in London, Paris, Vienna and Naples. The under rote government loans, financed railways, backed industrial ventures, and importantly for our story, they had been involved in the diamond trade for years.

Rothschild's bank had financed European gem merchants, backed London syndicates that bought rough diamonds, loaned money to cutters in Antwerp and Amsterdam, and appraised stones for royalty. They understood diamonds not as romance, but as numbers. Nathaniel or Natty Rothschild sat at the center of the London branch and m Rothschild and sons, with access to enormous pools of capital.

Rhodes approached him with a pit. If Kimberly remained divided between competing companies, diamonds would flood the market, prices would fall, the illusion of rarity would be destroyed. Everyone would lose, including the Wrothchilds. But if the Beers could swallow its rivals.

If one company could control production, stockpile excess stones, and release them in measured quantities, then diamonds could keep the illusion of being permanently scarce, prices could be kept high, and the wroth Childs could own a piece of a cartel that manufactured rarity. Wrothchilds agreed with their backing Roads had the financial artillery to go after Barnardo. What followed

is not a gunfight, but a stock market war. Roads, in his banking allies, began quietly accumulating shares in Barnado's company, Kimberly Central. At the same time, they used another tactic. They opened up the taps. De Beers ramped up production. Diamonds flooded the market, prices slid. Panic rippled through investors who owned Kimberly stock. Some sold, others pledged shares as collateral.

Rhodes groups stood ready to buy. Barnado fought back, securing his own financing to consolidate his position, but slowly, almost invisibly, control began to tilt. In one bold move, Rhads offered to buy a crucial piece of the Kimberly mine from French shareholders at an eye watering price, not because the ground was worth that much, but because owning it would block Bernado from turning his big mining hole in Kimberly

into a unified operation. Barnado countered raising his bid. It seemed like he'd won, until Rhodes proposed a new deal. He suggested that instead of torching each other with higher and higher offers, Bernardo could withdraw his bid. Roads would then buy the property at the lower price than immediately resell it to Bernardo in exchange for cash and, more importantly, a large block of Kimberly central shares. Bernardo, thinking he'd

outsmarted his rival, agreed. He saved money, gained operational control, and handed Rose a trojan horse a significant foothold into his company. From there, the squeeze intensified. With Rothschild's capital and allies across Europe. Rhodes continued buying stock in Barnado's company as he and his partners quietly passed key thresholds of ownership. Barnardo started to realize what was happening, but

by March eighteen eighty eight, it was too late. Rhodes block controlled enough shares to dictate terms Barnardo, was forced to agree to a merger. Kimberly Central into Beer's joined into one new entity. De Beer's consolidated minds. By eighteen ninety cecil Roads, through Debiers and his alliance with Rothschild, controlled more than ninety five percent of the world's diamond production. The first true diamond cartel was born. With his rivals absorbed,

Rhodes could finally do what he'd wanted all along. He could make diamonds scarce. He ordered mines to reduce output, closed some operations and slowed others. Instead of dumping everything on the market, de Beers began selling only what the world could absorb at high prices. The excess millions of carrots of stones were put into volts. De Beer's stockpiled when demand dipped, the stockpile grew when demand rose. A carefully measured trickle was released. The public never saw the

full scale of production. They saw only what De Beers wanted them to see. At the same time Roads consolidated distribution, he created a single channel for selling De Beer's diamonds, a London syndicate that bought the entire output at fixed prices. They resold stones to cutters in Antwerp and other centers. If you wanted South African diamonds, you bought them from

this channel at De Beer's terms. Anyone who tried to operate outside the system, a rogue producer, a merchant with acts access to off market stones, they found themselves squeezed or forced into a buy out, or maybe they would discover that their access to credit dried up, or their shipments mysteriously struggled to find buyers. Bit by bit, the Beers extended its reach from the pit to the jeweler's bench, mining, stockpiling, pricing, distribution,

all governed by one company's strategy. It was the early blueprint of what would later be called the central selling organization, the command center of the diamond cartel. And as if this corporate power wasn't enough, Rhodes added political power to the mix. In eighteen ninety he became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. He controlled not just mines and markets, but laws and borders. He would go on to carve

out two colonies, Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia that bore his name. Then, in nineteen oh two, at the age of forty eight, and the pinnacle of his power. Cecil Rhads died, his body, exhausted by the same frailties he'd been sent to Africa to escape. He left no wife, no children, no direct errors. He left his fortune to Oxford University to fund scholarships in his name, and he left behind something else, a diamond machine powerful enough to shape the global perception of value.

For the first time in history, one company had the practical ability to decide how rare diamonds feel and how much they were worth. But Rhodes would not be the last mastermind to sit at the center of this machine, because within a year of his death, another young entrepreneur arrived in South Africa, a German Jewish immigrant who looked at the diamond cartel Roads built and decided to turn

it into something even more formidable. If Cecil Rhodes created the diamond monopoly, Ernest Oppenheimer would perfect it.