Once I learnt more about De Beers, I'm wondering if there is any other product that one could pull of such stunt and make themselves billionaires?

Step one - find a rare mineral that at this point has value close to zero. It is rare but worthless.

Step two - obtain monopoly on mining it or control it as much as you can (buy spots with dense occurrence, etc)

Step three - throw money at important and powerful people (such as Spielberg, so that in his new movie today's Marilyn Monroe is wearing your ore as a form of very high luxury) other media stars, politicians etc.

Step four - continue with excellent PR until enough wives or soon-to-be wives come to their soon-to-be husbands and request them to update their luxury status by buying your ore.

Step five - collect trillions of dollars across the globe, by tightly controlling your ore and its harvest.

Edit: step six - rinse and repeat for 50 years getting yourself even wealthier.

> Once I learnt more about De Beers, I'm wondering if there is any other product that one could pull of such stunt and make themselves billionaires?

Various sports. Formula One, for instance, is the epitome of racing despite there being plenty of other ways to race cars.

Bottled water. Competes with a spout that everyone has several of in their home, yet people still pay up for it.

> I'm wondering if there is any other product that one could pull of such stunt and make themselves billionaires?

Maybe not exactly billionaires, but

If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion. :)

Not sure if anyone will appreciate this, but if you haven't seen it, it's oddly relevant to your comment:

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/acaxis/key-and-peele-the-heist

It's a skit by Key & Peele describing a genius plan for a bank heist. I won't ruin the punchline by going any further.

Creating artifical preference for something peoplease can only get from you is pretty much what the entire field of marketing is about; deBeers may be an outstanding success, but they aren't doing anything (in those terms) fundamentally different than pretty much every business on the planet is trying to do, just with different mechanisms of establishing moats.

Except De Beers gets to keep the money, thus making it attractive to dig big holes.

If they had to hand it over to the Customs Officers those holes would suddenly be less attractive.

Conflict diamonds would still be profitable, and diamonds are easy to smuggle. If lab diamonds can overcome the marketing problem, they will bury De Beers and drive the price into the ground for natural diamonds, and the whole dirty industry goes away.