Ten Times a Year, One Room in London Decided Who Got the World's Diamonds

Ten times a year, from the 1930s on, a closed group of roughly eighty to a hundred and twenty-five companies was summoned to one room in London. Each was handed a sealed box of diamonds, already sorted and already priced by a single company, with no right to negotiate or even open it first. That same company built a marketing campaign around the idea that a diamond was forever — and for nearly a century, that room decided how many diamonds the world got to see, and what they cost. In 2026, the company is being sold for a fraction of what it once was worth, to a buyer who used to run it himself. Sources: • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers • https://skyjems.ca/pages/encyclopedia... • https://rapaport.com/news/anglo-ameri... • https://nationaljeweler.com/articles/... • https://www.spokesman.com/stories/199... • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_R... • https://www.thedrum.com/news/1948-de-... • https://time.com/archive/6677577/the-... • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberl... • https://www.justice.gov/archive/atr/p... • https://ec.europa.eu/competition/anti... • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neelie_... • https://www.jckonline.com/editorial-a... • https://nationaljeweler.com/articles/... • https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonyd... Footage & images: Pexels, Wikimedia Commons. Some scenes are AI-generated illustrations; no real person is depicted with AI. • Open pit mine.jpg — Irene2005 (CC BY 2.0) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... • Cecil Rhodes 19th-century portrait bust.jpg — Acabashi (CC BY-SA 4.0) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... • Oppenheimer1945.jpg — Koos Raucamp (ANEFO) (CC0) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... • Neelie Kroes NOG Brussel.jpg — Sebastiaan ter Burg from Utrecht, The Netherlands (CC BY-SA 2.0) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Also available with a Spanish audio track.