The Secretive "Old Money" Family That Controls Africa: The Oppenheimers

On the twenty-fifth of September nineteen seventeen, in the middle of the First World War, a thirty-seven-year-old German-born diamond buyer working in Kimberley named Ernest Oppenheimer incorporated the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa with original capital of one million pounds. He had chosen the name himself, cabling his American partner William Lincoln Honnold that it was very necessary for an American identity to form part of the company's title. Half the money was American, drawn through J.P. Morgan, Guaranty Trust and Newmont Mining, and the other half British and South African. Ninety-five years later, on the sixteenth of August, twenty twelve, his grandson Nicky Oppenheimer sold the family's forty percent interest in De Beers to Anglo American for a final headline value of about five point two billion dollars in cash. ------------------- Gain FREE access to secret full-length documentaries on wealthy families "too scandalous for YouTube" by joining our newsletter: https://www.substack.com/@oldmoneyluxury ------------------- Ernest Oppenheimer was born on the twenty-second of May, 1880 in Friedberg in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, the son of a cigar merchant, and joined the London diamond brokerage Dunkelsbühler and Company at seventeen, arriving in Kimberley as its buyer in 1902. King George V knighted him in 1921 for his wartime services, transforming a German-born diamond buyer into Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, a British knight and South African industrialist, and in 1923 the Halbscheid Agreement gave his Consolidated Diamond Mines fifty-year exclusive rights to Diamond Area One in South West Africa. In 1926 Anglo American became a major De Beers shareholder; Ernest bought blocks whenever they came to market and, with N.M. Rothschild support introduced through Morgan Grenfell, secured full control in December 1929. He built the Diamond Corporation Limited in February 1930, and on the thirty-first of March, 1932 he shut every De Beers mine in Kimberley. In 1938 De Beers hired the Philadelphia agency N.W. Ayer and Son; the copywriter Frances Gerety, exhausted late one night in 1947, wrote a final line almost as an afterthought, and A Diamond Is Forever first appeared in an advertisement in 1948. In 1967 the J. Walter Thompson Japanese campaign took the diamond engagement ring from less than five percent of Japanese brides to a national institution, and the guideline for how much a man should spend rose from one month's salary in the 1930s to two months in the United States and three in Japan. Harry Oppenheimer took the chairmanship of Anglo American and De Beers on Ernest's death in 1957, funded the Progressive Party and Helen Suzman, and co-founded the Urban Foundation with Anton Rupert after the Soweto uprising of June 1976. Nicky Oppenheimer, born on the eighth of June, 1945 in Johannesburg, became chairman of De Beers in 1998 and sold the family stake in 2012; Anglo American booked more than seven point eight billion dollars of De Beers impairments across three years and selected a preferred bidder at roughly one billion dollars in August 2026.