The Fatal Attraction of Gold

There’s a moment in John Huston’s 1948 cinematic masterpiece, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” when the old prospector, Howard, delivers a warning to the young Fred C. Dobbs. The warning isn’t about Mexican banditos, or the elements, or the risk of dehydration. It’s about the prize they’re seeking in the mountains. He says: “I know what gold does to men’s souls.”

The lust for gold has been part of the human condition for thousands of years. Wars have been fought over it. Civilizations have been wiped out because of it. More recently, discoveries in California in 1848 and the Yukon in 1896 set off massive gold rushes that created chaos, new cities, and spectacular fortunes.

The metal people covet and fight over is the result of the most violent, spectacular event in the universe. Imagine, if you will, two massive stars in a distant galaxy. Bound by gravity, they’ve been dancing around each other since soon after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. When they finally exhaust their nuclear fuel, they don’t just fizzle out. They explode and collapse into neutron stars—city-sized spheres so dense that a teaspoon of their matter would weigh a billion tons on Earth.

These two ultra-dense neutron stars are locked in a gravitational dance, inching closer and closer for eons. Finally, in an instant, they collide. This is the universe’s most powerful particle accelerator going supernova. Imagine the kinetic energy of a billion stars released in a flash. In that cataclysmic moment, the very fabric of space-time ripples, and a torrent of subatomic particles is unleashed. For a brief moment, the universe becomes a forge hot and dense enough to perform alchemy on an unfathomable scale.

Here’s the simple physics of it. A regular star, like our sun, is a cosmic furnace that uses nuclear fusion to cook up only light elements—hydrogen and helium. Gold is a heavy element. Its atomic nucleus is packed with 79 protons and 118 neutrons. Forcing those particles together, creating an atom that heavy, requires an almost unimaginable amount of energy.

The merging of neutron stars—a kilonova—is the only place where the pressure is high enough and the neutron flow fast enough to build such a heavy element. The collision must produce heat up to an insanely high 10 billion degrees C to allow the “rapid neutron capture” required to produce gold. As a reference, our sun’s core is only 15 million degrees C. The gold atoms created in that blast furnace, scattered across our galaxy, seeded the gas cloud that eventually formed our solar system, including the planet Earth.

The physical and chemical features forged in that awesome process make gold irresistible. First off, gold is the only metal that isn’t silver or grey. It’s an irresistibly warm hue, the color of the sun itself. Holding a bar of refined gold, which is twice as heavy as lead, feels rare and eternal.

Second, gold doesn’t tarnish, rust, or corrode. It remains in the ground for billions of years, and when we finally dig it up, it shines as brightly as the day it was forged. This incorruptibility made it the perfect symbol of eternity, of might, of divinity. A king or queen wearing gold was telling their subjects, “I, like this metal, am not of the common, decaying world.”

Gold is also incredibly malleable. A single ounce can be hammered into a sheet so thin it covers 300 square feet, or drawn out into a thread so fine that it’s 35 miles long. You can beat it, shape it, and mold it into practically any form you desire. It’s the ultimate artistic medium.

To our ancient ancestors, gold was magical—a piece of the sun that God brought down to Earth. For millennia, gold was purely royal. To the Egyptians, it was the flesh of the gods, the adornment of pharaohs, the sacred vessels in temples. For the Incas, it was the sweat of the gods. For the Ashanti people in Ghana, dazzling golden regalia has always been part of important ceremonies such as coronations. To them all, gold was an eternal symbol.

The transition from royal adornment to a medium of exchange has shaped our civilization over the past couple of thousand years. The Lydians, in the 7th century B.C., were the first to strike gold coins. I started collecting physical gold twenty-five years ago and was fortunate enough to acquire one of these rare coins.

The traits that made gold divine also made it an ideal currency. It’s portable and can represent high value in a small package. It’s divisible: you can melt it down and remake it into smaller units. It’s durable. It doesn’t rot or decay like a sheep or a bushel of wheat. It doesn’t get consumed like oil. And it’s uniform: one ounce of pure gold is interchangeable with any other ounce.

You might say that gold became the first globally trusted “brand.” You didn’t have to know the king who issued the coin; you only had to recognize the gleam. And with that, the genie was out of the bottle. Gold was no longer just a symbol of wealth and power; it was power itself—portable, private, permanent.

This brings us back to Dobbs and the Sierra Madre and what gold does to human nature. Gold seems to trigger almost the same limbic reward circuitry as food, water, and sex. It signals status, survival, success. Today, it’s become a proxy for security in an uncertain world.

But as “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” shows, the pursuit of it can corrode the soul. As the old prospector knew, gold itself is neutral, but the “gold fever” it engenders—the distrust, the paranoia, the greed—leads to war, plunder, and betrayal. Dobbs doesn’t start out as a bad guy, but his lust turns him into a monster. He learns that the real treasure isn’t the gold, but the camaraderie and shared journey to find it. At the end of the film, all the gold dust is scattered to the wind.

Next time you see a gold bar or necklace, remember that you’re looking at the remnant of a cosmic collision, a rare and indestructible piece of the universe. Remember, too, that the way you view it—whether as a store of value, a hedge against fiat collapse, or an embodied symbol of greed and plunder—says as much about the human heart as it does about the metal itself.

I’m often asked these days whether it’s a good time to get into gold. I answer as I have for the last quarter century: it’s always been a good idea to own gold, and I believe it will be for the foreseeable future.

So yes, by all means, own gold. Just don’t let it own you.