Guggenheim’s Scott Minerd, fickle Bitcoin forecaster, dies after heart attack

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Scott Minerd, chief investment officer of Guggenheim Partners, a top Wall Street financier who made waves in the crypto markets for his ever-changing calls on the price of bitcoin, died Wednesday after suffering a heart attack in the age of 63.

The firm announced his death in a statement Thursday. He was a regular on the CNBC financial news cable network. According to the statement, he had become the Guggenheim’s public speaker, while serving as a top leader and mentor.

“Scott was a key innovator and thought leader who helped make Guggenheim Investments the global company it is today,” CEO Mark Walter said in the release.

Among traditional finance investment executives, Minerd was notoriously willing to risk bitcoin (BTC) price predictions, some of them quite extreme, and usually with mixed success.

In December 2020, for example, when bitcoin was trading around $20,000, he said the cryptocurrency “should be worth around $400,000.” The price of BTC soared just above $40,000 in January 2021 and peaked at around $69,000 late last year.

In May, when bitcoin was around $29,000, he told CNBC it could drop to $8,000. It is now around $16,600.

Just last week, he told Bloomberg Television that there was “another shoe to drop” after the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried crypto exchange FTX last month.

“It’s like any number of times we’ve had easy money and a lot of speculation,” he told the outlet. “Weaker players go down first. Crypto was obviously something crazy.”

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