Human Capital

This is the story of Robert Kuok and how he built Shangri-La.

We cover:

• How a stock of cigarette paper, bought with worthless war money, gave his family its first capital
• The Thai banker who backed him when the British banks wouldn’t
• The sugar refinery deal, and how he used the government to rewrite a bad contract
• The 1963 trade that nearly wiped him out, until a hurricane in the Caribbean saved him
• How he got into hotels with a 10 percent stake in land meant for terrace houses, then took control in a stock market crash
• Why he went into China before almost anyone else, and stayed when others ran

How De Beers Took Over the World’s Diamonds

“A diamond is forever.” “Two months’ salary.” The four Cs. None of it is tradition. It all came out of one company.

In this episode we go back to the start of De Beers. It begins with a sickly vicar’s son from Hertfordshire who was shipped off to South Africa at 17. Twenty years later he controlled 90% of the world’s diamonds.

We break down how Cecil Rhodes went from pumping water out of flooded mines to writing the biggest cheque in history. Then we cover how a German clerk on £500 a year, Ernest Oppenheimer, quietly took the company over and turned it into the most powerful monopoly the world has seen.

In this episode:

• How the diamond rush worked, and why you could only dig straight down
• The pump deal that taught Rhodes “every man has his price”
• Using shares as money to buy up a whole mine
• Losing an auction on purpose to win a rival’s company
• The £5.3 million cheque, worth about £890 million today
• How Oppenheimer built a business with no cash of his own
• Surrounding De Beers: the supply, the sales, then the boardroom
• Surviving the Great Depression without cutting prices
• The marketing that turned a stone into a symbol of love

Plus Rhodes’s 11 rules for building an empire, and why lab-grown diamonds now threaten the one thing De Beers was built on.

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