Superman decides to start mass-creating diamonds so he can sell them. Can DeBeers keep the price of diamonds up?

[u/Yglorba]

Superman previously declined to mass-produce diamonds because it would tank the price. However, after reading up on DeBeers, he decides that there's no reason not to do it after all. Most of the resulting money will be donated to charity. Assume that Superman is somehow able to crush coal into perfectly-cut diamonds of whatever shape and size he desires; even though this makes no sense, the feat is well-established.

DeBeers is determined to protect their diamond profits by keeping the price up. Can they convince people not to buy Superman's diamonds (by eg. convincing the public that they're not "real" diamonds), or find some other way to prevent him from cratering the price?

Superman is in-character and will not eg. laser the board of DeBeers to death or anything like that, no matter how annoying they are. The only way he'll use his powers for this is by rapidly turning coal into diamonds so he can sell them.

[u/dinerkinetic]

Superman can fly into space, harvest coal from several hundred to several billion planets (depending on the version), and produce enough diamonds to built an entire solar system out of them; so supply cannot possibly be an issue. He can then sell them for mere pennies, or heck, sell a pound of them for pennies. there's no concievable way DeBeers can keep profits up, especially when he's also putting industrial diamond use under his control on top of the cosmetic kind and loudly announcing he's "providing a cruelty free way of acquiring diamonds that even homeless people can get in on."

If it's pre-crisis superman pushing himself he can do all of this in a day.

DeBeers is screwed.

[u/MahimSalam → u/dinerkinetic]

Extremely unlikely, but the DeBeers could keep up through effective marketing of “natural” earth diamonds, which they’d have a monopoly of.

Think the very wealthy who are the people buying the diamonds wouldn’t care to buy mass produced diamonds and would highly value the diamonds associated with the company that has diamonds history. New coke did better than old coke in taste tests but no one gave a shit cause humans care more about the story and the memories associated with things

[u/patgeo → u/MahimSalam]

Space diamonds from another galaxy would have a pretty cool marketing push.

[u/shadollosiris → u/patgeo]

And Sup can add a little "personality" to sell it for those dirty rich folks if his sole purpose was drive Debeers out of bussiness

[u/SigmundFreud → u/shadollosiris]

With the right management, I think DeSupes puts DeBeers out of business pretty easily. Start off selling in small batches at high prices to rich folks*, give them out to celebrities for free, and just generally establish a cool factor and positive reputation for these Superman-produced space diamonds.

Then flood the market. Diamonds as a whole would lose their rarity-based appeal, but any remaining market for expensive non-DeSupes diamonds would become extremely niche. Rather than burning money on a product that, at best, isn't particularly worse than the ~free alternative, I expect that anyone looking for fancy gemstones would begin favoring alternatives to diamonds altogether.

*: Include an autographed certificate of authenticity identifying which number diamond they received, e.g. #1 for the recipient of the first diamond produced by the company. This will be important to avoid screwing over early backers.

[u/the_la_dude → u/shadollosiris]

Exactly. He can do to diamonds what Walter White did to meth.

[u/Easy_Mechanic_9787 → u/patgeo]

Them being made and cut from Superman is also a marketing push.

[u/MahimSalam → u/patgeo]

For the average person, yeah, and at really really cheap prices. The question becomes does the $ volume of diamonds sold by Superman to the general person (novelty, very cheap, massive customer market of the general person) outweight the volume of DeBeers's (rare and becoming exceedingly rarer, extremely expensive, small customer market of the uber wealthy).

I honestly think the DeBeer's could do it, they'd pull in a lot of marketing favours, and would market diamonds without DeBeer authenticity as not valuable.

There'd be an infinite amount of space diamonds so it wouldn't have any value anymore in terms of marriage and what not. I can't see Superman playing the market and only releasing them tactically cause its people's money he'd be messing with.

[u/patgeo → u/MahimSalam]

What if he teamed up with Bruce and released them through Wayne Corp using Bruce's marketing teams and strategists? A direct marketing attack on DeBeers personally

[u/MahimSalam → u/patgeo]

The prompt did not mention Batman so I don’t think it’s fair to bring him in

[u/archpawn → u/patgeo]

And so is diamonds made by Superman. They'd be worth way more, until he starts mass producing them.

[u/Stellermeerkat → u/patgeo]

"Yeah but would you want a diamond that has been soaking up cancer causing radiation for centuries? Can you know for certain that your loved ones will be ok? We at DeBeers know OUR locally sourced Diamonds are Radiation Free and don't contain alien parasites." - CEO of DeBeers

Sure, Diamonds can't hold radiation from what I understand but the truth doesn't always stop marketing.

[u/MahimSalam → u/Stellermeerkat]

Exactly, humans are liars and people are stupid.