Ernest Oppenheimer

Without a doubt.

Ernest Oppenheimer wasn't in gold 10 years before he realized he needs a diversifier.

And what was it? Copper.

And he pursued it aggressively.

was designed to stand for everything that Rhodes had never been.

The next person that we're gonna study, Ernest Oppenheimer, was a German Jewish immigrant who started as a junior clerk at a London diamond firm and was sent to Kimberley at 22 as someone else's diamond buyer.

During World War II, he engineered control of German South Africa's diamond mines by offering the German owners shares rather than watching them lose everything due to war reparations.

He founded the other component of De Beers, Anglo-American, in 1917 with backing from J.P. Morgan, among many others, bought into the De Beers board in 1926, and took chairmanship in 1929.

Everything that the cartel became in the 20th century was under him, and then later his son, Harry, who grew that playbook.

control the supply, control the price, and control the story.

Where Cecil Rhodes wanted diamonds to expand the British Empire, Oppenheimer wanted the empire to be diamonds.

From Epstein, The Rise and Fall of Diamonds, whereas Rhodes had seen the diamond monopoly as a means of extending the British Empire, Oppenheimer saw it as an end to itself.

world.

But the nice thing about me is, so that was Ernest Oppenheimer's, one of his actual farms there.

Yeah.

So his old farmhouse was still a potential dwelling for some of the students.

So the warden of the Res would stay on the first floor and then there were two other floors above.

So I stayed on the top floor of Ernest Oppenheimer's house.

What is it, like a little jail cell or? No, it's a house.

It looks like a house.

Now, you know, that's the fourth generation.

You've had Ernest Oppenheimer, Harry Oppenheimer, Nicky Oppenheimer, now Jonathan Oppenheimer coming through, and this looks like, you know, his new glory, where he's gonna warn the world about climate change, but with a lot of scientific backing.

Well, that's where we'll leave it for this week.

Uh, thanks so much, Martin Creamer.

And he saw an opportunity to take control of the Congo's, you know, the mining sector and diamonds.

And actually he had a company, I believe it was a subsidiary of the Oppenheimer Diamond Company, which you know about.

more about than me.

His company were subsidiaries of Oppenheimer and he drove the Kennedy and US policy in the Congo and the consolidation of the power of Joseph Mobutu.

He was very close with Joseph Mobutu personally.

And his agent was Larry Devlin, worked for the CIA.