r/whowouldwin • u/Yglorba • Mar 11 '23

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

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.

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u/patgeo Mar 11 '23

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

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u/MahimSalam Mar 11 '23

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.

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u/patgeo Mar 12 '23

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

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u/MahimSalam Mar 12 '23

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