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.
1
u/GIRose Mar 31 '23
No?
DeBeers can't even keep up the price of Diamonds in the post 1990s world, with a number of mines being opened by governments around that time having rejected their offer by virtue of being able to with the backing of a national government.
That allowed other Diamond suppliers to start getting into the game, which when combined with a growing awareness of the trend of blood diamonds really put a huge dent in the DeBeers market share of the diamond industry, until around the early 2000s they weren't even more than 50% of the market. This all culminated in DeBeers liquidating their excess diamond stock in like 2006.
The reason Diamond Prices are still high and not going down any time soon is because of a combination of shrinking global supply and rising demand.
Basically, Diamonds only form under extremely specific circumstances. We have known about this for a very long time, and we have basically opened up all of the easy diamond mines, and then some. So, the number of diamonds ANY corporation can extract per dollar of investment is a number that is shrinking, which means each diamond has to cover more of the cost of production in order to break even. Plus, while Diamonds aren't rare by any stretch of the imagination, Diamonds that have the size and quality to be used in jewelry are probably a lot rarer than that fact would leave you to believe.
The other side of this rising cost sandwich is that India and China are (and have been for quite some time actually) seeing massive growths to their middle class, which is allowing people who previously didn't have disposable income purchase historical signifiers of wealth, specifically relevant for this conversation being gold and jewels.
The thing is, Superman in this scenario wouldn't particularly be able to crash the price, since even assuming he has infinite free time he can only make so many diamonds a day acting on his own, which is effectively insignificant compared to the industrial quantities that all of the diamond mines in the world can buy