BitMEX co-founder and Bitcoin billionaire Arthur Hayes is known for making big, bold — and sometimes controversial — Bitcoin price predictions, and says it doesn’t faze him when he gets it wrong. 

“Nothing really happens,” Hayes tells Magazine, who asked if he worries about backlash when his Bitcoin predictions fall flat. 

Win or lose, Hayes doesn’t sweat his calls

The youngest African-American crypto billionaire in history is the first to admit that most of his price calls don’t land. “I get it wrong, and I’ve gotten most of them wrong,” he laughs.

“I don’t know why people are hesitant to do it; it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day.”

“If you’re generally correct, you’re okay,” the 40-year-old former investment banker adds. 

Hayes is pretty upfront with his calls; he doesn’t hide them if he’s right or wrong.

In September, Hayes — now the chief investment officer at the VC firm he co-founded, Maelstrom Fund — made a short-term bearish call on Bitcoin, linking it to the sliding Japanese yen. However, things didn’t unfold as he had expected over that particular weekend, and Bitcoin held strong.

Fair play to Hayes; he later owned it on X, posting, “I was wrong.”

“Time to trade some dogshit memecoins,” Hayes said. Similarly, on March 24, Hayes said that Bitcoin would hit $110,000 before it retests $76,500. But just a month later, on April 9, Bitcoin sank to $76,500.

Of course, credit where it’s due; Hayes gets it right too sometimes. In December, Hayes predicted a crypto downturn and a “vicious sell-off” after US President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration…and he was spot on.

Probably because over the years, the New York-raised Bitcoin OG has developed a super-secret method to come up with his end-of-year price targets:

Pick round numbers that humans like.” 

Hayes holding strong on $250,000 Bitcoin call for 2025

His latest call is that Bitcoin will reach $250,000 by the end of this year and is confident that Bitcoin won’t see another $70,000 drawdown on the way there.

“I really don’t see there’s going to be sort of a big binary risk-off at the moment that could spook the markets, and people will dump risks that would get us down to those levels again anytime soon,” Hayes says.