Guggenheim's Scott Minerd, Fickle Bitcoin Forecaster, Dies After Heart Attack

Guggenheim Partners Chief Investment Officer Scott Minerd, a top Wall Street financier who made waves in crypto markets for his ever-shifting calls on bitcoin's price, died Wednesday after a heart attack at the age of 63.

The firm announced his death in a statement Thursday. He was a regular presence on the financial-news cable network CNBC. According to the statement, he had become the public speaker for Guggenheim, along with serving as a senior leader and a mentor.

"Scott was a key innovator and thought leader who was instrumental in building Guggenheim Investments into the global business it is today," CEO Mark Walter said in the statement.

Among investment executives in traditional finance, Minerd was notoriously willing to venture predictions on the bitcoin (BTC) price, some of them quite extreme, and typically with mixed success.

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

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

As recently as last week, he told Bloomberg Television that there was "another shoe to drop" from last month's collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX crypto exchange.

"This is just like any number of periods where we had easy money and a lot of speculation," he told the channel. "The weakest players fall first. Crypto was obviously something that is crazy."