Inside the Fight Over Guggenheim Partners CIO Scott Minerd’s $400 Million Estate

On the last day of Scott Minerd’s life, he awoke before dawn in the “Big House”—what friends called his Spanish revival mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, just north of San Diego.

The six-acre estate has its own vineyard and horse stables, a palatial master bedroom warmed by a 17th-century-style fireplace, and a lagoon with waterfalls and a swim-up bar. Neighbors once included the former chair of Hewlett-Packard, who reportedly paid the Rolling Stones $2 million to perform at a private party for his wife just down the road.

Minerd was new to Rancho Santa Fe, having fled south from Marina del Rey to escape the pandemic, but he got COVID anyway. When he awoke that morning of December 21, 2022, he felt sluggish. Was it just jet lag from a recent 17-hour flight he took to see the World Cup in Qatar? The lingering symptoms of long COVID? Or maybe another late night watching Monty Python episodes on his phone, which he was known to do. “He was a hypochondriac,” said a friend. “Every day he woke up, Scott thought something was wrong with him.”

As global chief investment officer for Guggenheim Partners, he oversaw nearly $300 billion in assets under management at the firm. Minerd was constantly in motion. If he wasn’t in Zoom calls and portfolio manager meetings at his office in Santa Monica, he was on the road. He visited the Kennedys in Hyannis Port; shared the stage with Al Gore at Davos; debated Tony Blair at the Milken Institute Global Conference; enjoyed a Dodgers game next to Magic Johnson in the owner’s box. One of his last major deals for the firm was joining Elisabeth Murdoch in a $100 million investment in LeBron James’s entertainment outfit, The SpringHill Company.

That was the public Minerd, a financial sage and one of the most influential voices on Wall Street. His private interests were atypical for the quarter-zip world of high finance; he loved bodybuilding. At six foot three and more than 300 pounds, he wore a 75-regular jacket and required an extra-wide chair at public events. His lifting regimen included weights so heavy that they wore holes in the soles of his gym shoes. Getting ripped gave Minerd an acute sense of well-being. He was obsessed with workouts, high-protein meals, and muscle-bound physiques à la Mr. Olympia and Mister Universe.

The morning of the day he died, he devoured a bodybuilder’s breakfast, a pile of high-protein pancakes (no syrup), likely brought by his housekeeper. He flicked on his Bloomberg terminal to assess European market news, then checked to see how Asian markets had performed that day. Scrolling through his email, he forwarded a video link of monarch butterflies to his longtime friend Teri Chiota.

Minerd kept his gym life out of public view. Ironically, his last moments were caught on camera. According to a source, closed-circuit video at the gym is said to show Minerd, after a fierce round of upper-body work, walking off to get a drink of water. Moments later, he turns around and drops like a rock.

Gym members rushed to his side and paramedics soon showed up. Not long after arriving at the Palomar Medical Center in nearby Escondido, he was pronounced dead of “probable cardiac arrest,” according to his death certificate. Chiota got word of his passing from Minerd’s husband, actor and producer Eloy Mendez. Mendez had arrived with Gracie, Minerd’s rescue dog. Gracie sniffed the bed where her owner lay, then lay down under it. Minerd was 63. It was four days before Christmas.

Two weeks later, friends, family, and colleagues gathered at the Luxe Sunset Boulevard Hotel in Los Angeles. From there they boarded shuttles to a secret destination. Among the 150 or so guests were CNBC’s Brian Sullivan, OJ Simpson defense lawyer Robert Shapiro, LA real estate mogul Robert Barth, and financier Michael Milken. They gathered at the Brentwood home of political pollster Frank Luntz, a friend of Minerd’s for a decade. Luntz is a true-blue Dodgers fan: One of his favorite possessions is a 2020 Dodgers World Series ring Minerd gave him as a gift. Guests were asked to drop their cell phones into sealed bags. Minerd’s body lay in wake in an open casket in Luntz’s residence. Minerd once said he admired the hybrid nature of Luntz’s home and mini conference center, with its whimsical artifacts of political Americana and a replica of the Oval Office. A few years earlier Luntz had hosted a conversation between Minerd and Tony Blair.

The following day mourners trekked to the 62-acre Hollywood Forever cemetery. Minerd’s nephew, Matthew Minerd, a former monk and now professor at a Byzantine Catholic seminary, gave a graveside eulogy. The biggest surprise—a shock to some—was Minerd’s final resting place: a hand-carved white-marble sarcophagus the size of a minivan. The above-ground tomb sits on its own peninsula overlooking a lake with turtles and blue herons, in the “Garden of Legends,” not far from Burt Reynolds. The estimated cost: $4 million.

Who gets buried in a sarcophagus? Popes and kings, usually. Napoleon, Ulysses S. Grant. Minerd was neither a statesman nor Hollywood royalty. True, he was the face of Guggenheim Partners and liked to think of himself as a bond king. But this grandiose final gesture in a celebrity cemetery seemed a bizarre final act in Minerd’s life.

“He would have hated it,” said a friend.

Or would he? Minerd had a following worthy of a royal. At Davos or the annual Milken conference, corporate leaders, celebrities, and even heads of state sought Minerd’s financial guidance. So did show anchors on CNBC and Bloomberg, platforms on which he was ubiquitous. His 140,000-plus acolytes on X—traders, brokers, investment managers—catapulted Minerd’s stinging criticism of Fed policy and crypto predictions across social media. Minerd’s physical girth mirrored his outsize influence on capital markets. He controlled a lot of money and was an early managing partner of Guggenheim Partners, one of the hottest Wall Street start-ups in decades. What he didn’t control was the chronic anxiety and inner turmoil he felt in both his public and private lives.

While Minerd presented as a financial demigod, he had his share of personal insecurities. Minerd’s conservative Presbyterian mother never accepted her son’s sexuality, a friend says, nor did the faith of his youth. I witnessed some of his emotional flare-ups myself in meetings and encounters with Minerd as his colleague at Guggenheim, where I was chief content officer for six years. “Scott was like a quantum entangled particle,” said another friend. “He had both an inferiority and superiority complex.” Other aspects of his private life are surfacing in a messy legal skirmish now unfolding in courtrooms in California and Nevada. The court cases are driven in part by an oddly crafted will, which failed to codify promises Minerd may have made to those who say they were closest to him.

As he built Guggenheim’s asset management business, Minerd was quietly creating his own fortune, worth an estimated $400 million. He owned real estate, derivatives, art, investment holdings, and interests in numerous business entities. He was one of the largest private shareholders of Guggenheim Partners. Among his possessions at one time: a 15th-century-styled California castle with moat, drawbridge, and five-hole golf course; at least another 10 properties, including two penthouse condos in Florida, which he bought for $12.5 million; a helicopter at the Los Angeles airport; and a museum-worthy art collection, which was said to include a Miró and a van Dyck.

But in the two years since his death, Minerd’s estate has been subject to claims involving two of his close friends, Chiota and Alex Figueroa. Both contend that in exchange for making themselves available 24/7, their fealty would be rewarded with multimillion-dollar California homes he had bought and allowed them to occupy rent-free. Chiota walked, boarded, and cared for Gracie. Figueroa was Minerd’s longtime personal trainer and, per his court filing, lover.

The estate’s personal representatives, Minerd’s longtime business associate Robert Fedoris and Peak Trust Company-NV, contend in a court document that, at least in Chiota’s case, there’s no proof Minerd promised her a house for anything. In a filing, their lawyers say the situation has caused “a probate nightmare,” giving rise to “extortion.” Chiota’s lawyers have volleyed back in court, suggesting Minerd’s will is “fraudulent” and that Fedoris “is unfit to administer the estate.” Filled with oddities, the six-page, typo-laden will was filed in Nevada; according to a filing by Chiota’s lawyers, the vast majority of Minerd’s assets are in California.

The composition of the will stands in stark contrast to Minerd’s otherwise meticulous approach to wealth management. His methodical investing strategies borrowed from behavioral economics and one of its pioneers, the late Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, who was a Guggenheim adviser. One of its concepts is to understand “loss aversion”—how investors feel far more pain from losing money than happiness from an equivalent gain. Another is that cognitive biases can be removed from the investment process by understanding two basic modes of thinking, the intuitive and the rational. Rational investing requires thinking slow, not fast.

Minerd used ideas like these to guide Guggenheim’s growth in assets under management from $35 billion in 2007 to nearly $300 billion more than a decade later. In 2017 all six of Minerd’s flagship bond funds earned five-star ratings from Morningstar. In 2019 he was involved in high-level discussions around his potential appointment to the seven-member Federal Reserve Board. That year Bill Gross, then Wall Street’s undisputed bond king (who once oversaw $2 trillion in assets), was asked who might succeed him in claiming the fixed-income throne. He said only one name came to mind: Scott Minerd.

Minerd’s confident, scrupulous investor persona belied a complicated interior life. “Anxious and depressed,” as one friend described him. “He wanted constant control of the people around him.” Most anyone requiring someone to board their dog or offer personal training would simply hire part-time professionals. Minerd wanted Chiota’s and Figueroa’s undivided loyalty at all hours and was willing to pay for such devotion.

Was Minerd’s impulse to control people in his off-hours compensation for the lack of control he felt in his own workplace? His industry peers—PIMCO’s Bill Gross, Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio, DoubleLine’s Jeff Gundlach—had enormous influence over the firms they helped build. Minerd never had that kind of power at Guggenheim. He was reminded of this when he reportedly lost an epic battle with CEO Mark Walter in 2016. A confidant of Walter’s was promoted to global head of the institutional distribution team, reportedly not Minerd’s first choice. She then restructured the US distribution team, axing 22 staffers. Minerd was furious—rumors spread that he would quit. He stayed, but moments like these must have left him with a sense of being diminished by peers inside Guggenheim.

At one point he embraced a new look, sporting Moschino-style tortoiseshell glasses and a ginger dye job. “Who is that, Elton John?” cracked a colleague watching Minerd on CNBC.

During Minerd’s most successful years, the firm’s management committee consisted of then president Todd Boehly, Walter, executive chairman Alan Schwartz, and Minerd. Boehly was off building a small media empire, acquiring Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, and Dick Clark Productions, producer of the Golden Globes. Schwartz had famously scored a stunning coup, landing Guggenheim a key advisory role on the $130 billion Verizon-Vodafone buyout, one of the biggest deals in global corporate history. Walter organized a Guggenheim investor group with Magic Johnson and others to buy the Dodgers for $2.15 billion (more than doubling in value since). Minerd had his own “projects,” as they were called internally, like the LeBron James deal, but nothing like these. He could have coinvested with Walter and Boehly in the Dodgers acquisition but declined, a decision one friend said Minerd likely regretted.

Minerd was a soft-spoken, sensitive guy known for his rapid ascent to power on Wall Street but who didn’t fit in with the alpha aggressive culture at most Wall Street firms. Boehly, Schwartz, and Walter had traditional families with children. Minerd was a gay bodybuilder with no kids who married a man nearly 20 years his junior. “I’m clearly the stepchild of the leadership team,” he once joked to me. Even his musical tastes made him an outlier. Guggenheim’s Chicago office holiday parties would host cocktail singers like James Bulanda. In Minerd’s Santa Monica office, the playlist for parties would include singers from the Cult or Jane’s Addiction. He was a devotee of the late Chris Cornell and friendly with electronic dance music artist Steve Aoki. He was a die-hard Linkin Park fan; when the band’s lead singer, Chester Bennington, died by suicide, Minerd attended the funeral.

In Minerd’s last few years, he favored gingham shirts and purple ties. Often his complexion was pallid, eyelids slightly drooping and rapidly blinking, his slightly oversized lower lip giving him the appearance of a pouty man-boy. At one point he embraced a new look, sporting Moschino-style tortoiseshell glasses and a ginger dye job. “Who is that, Elton John?” cracked a colleague watching Minerd on CNBC. But just a few months before his death, he appeared to gain weight, looking more obese than muscular. His gravelly, halting voice made him sound like a man whose tie was too tight. He sometimes appeared unhealthy, and he was. Minerd suffered from scoliosis, heart disease, high cholesterol, and a red blood cell disorder requiring regular treatment, according to friends, his death certificate, and court filings.

There was a consolation prize for Minerd’s “stepchild” status at Guggenheim: the rise of Scott Minerd, Wall Street influencer. Boehly, Schwartz, and Walter believed in staying off the media radar screen, prompting reporters to call Guggenheim “mysterious.” When one member of top leadership granted a rare in-depth interview, a leading public relations guru was flown in to coach the executive for a five-figure fee. Minerd was a cost-effective talking head, requiring no media coaching and relatively little prep. He could answer a question about European monetary policy in plain English. “Never in the history of the world have we had a series of central banks…essentially propping up global economies by printing money,” he told Consuelo Mack on WealthTrack. He was a Republican but a centrist. “Scott was politically commonsensical,” said Luntz. “He was focused on results and solutions.” Two years before he died, in a chat with editorial staffers at the Los Angeles Times, Minerd backed Medicare for All and said “the Green New Deal is actually not such a bad idea.”

Minerd became the face of Guggenheim, a role he jealously guarded. Media interviews were his emotional counterprogramming. They seemed to make him feel better, like a good therapy session. When he was on set, spouting his opinions about 10-year Treasury yields, he felt acceptance and affirmation. Conversations with TV anchors revolved around his opinions, his predictions. He once received a call from Sylvester Stallone seeking life insurance advice during an on-air interview, dazzling his host, Bloomberg News’s John Gittelsohn.

One problem: The hot take culture of business media isn’t a great match for a think-slow investment approach. He flip-flopped on Bitcoin, stating it should be worth $400,000, then that it could fall to $15,000, causing a hellish backlash from crypto fans. A year before his death, he predicted there could be a recession two to three years out (nope). He insisted gold would reach $5,000 per ounce (it has yet to clear $3,000).

Growing up, Minerd spent a lot of time in church. A solo vocalist in the choir, he read from Scripture at Good Friday services. He was raised in Chalk Hill, Pennsylvania, a tiny mountain community (population 71). His interest in bodybuilding was furthered by a summer job laying railroad tracks. It helped transform him from a skinny teen to a muscle-bound youth. Kendall Minerd, his father, was an insurance agent and worked for a railroad. His mother, Carol, was a rock-ribbed Presbyterian and, according to friends, a devout alcoholic. She imbued in him a sense of fear and respect for his faith. But as he got older and tried to come to terms with his sexuality, he received no understanding, much less acceptance, from his mother, said a friend. There weren’t many gay cultural icons in the 1970s and ’80s, certainly not in the Rust Belt. Growing up gay in Pennsylvania coal country would have put crushing weight on his self-image.

Graduating from Wharton in 1980, Minerd became an accountant at a Big Four firm. Soon, however, he changed career course, going to work in capital markets at Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. The wild number of variables affecting fixed-income investing—credit quality, fiscal policies, currency movements—fascinated him. Soon he was executing complicated trades around Swedish bonds, then a deal involving debt restructuring for Italy. From there he went to Credit Suisse First Boston, running the fixed-income desk. Some 15 years after he’d started, he had made enough to retire, or so he thought. At age 37 he moved to a waterfront home in LA’s Venice to devote time to bodybuilding.

In a 2012 interview, he recalled bumping into fellow bodybuilder and former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. “He’s smaller than me now,” Minerd marveled.

Gold’s Gym, the powerlifting center of the universe, became his second home. There he met Figueroa, a personal trainer who became his best friend. Figueroa was a minor celebrity with a major following in the bodybuilding world. He says he treated Minerd’s scoliosis with physical therapy three times a week and oversaw the design of his home gym. Minerd competed in LA bodybuilding championships, once ranking eighth in the super heavyweight division. At his peak he could bench-press 495 pounds for 20 straight repetitions. He and Figueroa ate often at the Firehouse on Rose Avenue, a former fire station converted to a restaurant catering to the Muscle Beach crowd. Among Minerd’s favorite orders: the hefty Bob Bowl, from the Bodybuilder’s Menu, loaded with Angus steak, peppers, and rice. In a 2012 interview, he recalled bumping into fellow bodybuilder and former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. “He’s smaller than me now,” Minerd marveled.

In 1998, Walter, a former client, made Minerd an offer to join a company he was forming. The new firm united three entities—Walter’s Chicago commercial paper company, a broker-dealer in New York, and some real estate assets owned by the Guggenheim family—under a single brand, Guggenheim Partners. Minerd said he’d join if he could stay in California.

The firm grew and so did his visibility. In Minerd’s early years at Guggenheim, Bloomberg Television rolled out a number of new shows; Fox Business launched, as did CNBC’s Closing Bell. They were new platforms hungry for talent. As he gained visibility and wealth, the public Minerd assumed the trappings of an aristocrat. He bought homes with vineyards, stables, and golf courses but had no interest in wine or horses and didn’t play golf.

Early in his Wall Street career, Minerd felt his peers “would not accept him” as a gay man, said Figueroa. Over time, Minerd also struggled to reconcile his devout upbringing. He was known to pray in the morning and at night. Once he spent hours flipping through the pages of a Bible, looking for references to homosexuality to understand God’s will on the matter, said a friend.

Around the time his mother died in 2013, Minerd began dating Mendez, whom Minerd had met years earlier when Mendez was waiting tables at the Firehouse. He was nearly 20 years younger than Minerd, charismatic with a broad, movie star smile. Restaurant work was his day job. Mendez had acting credits and had begun serving as a producer on short films. (Mendez did not respond to an interview request or to specific questions sent for this story.)

Minerd was smitten by the young man, originally from rural Oaxaca. Mendez’s father was a corn farmer; his mother sold flowers at a local market. Watching telenovelas as a kid, he dreamed of becoming an actor. He came to California at 18, settling in Venice Beach, taking ESL classes at night. One evening his mostly Hispanic class performed West Side Story in English. When people clapped at his performance, he once said on a podcast, “I have never in my life felt so alive.” Mendez enrolled in acting classes in Anaheim, taking six buses and traveling for four hours twice a week, he said. He created a fake résumé and began submitting himself for roles, making his movie debut in an independent film, Bread & Roses, starring Adrien Brody.

Mendez and Minerd traveled everywhere together—the Golden Globes, Sundance, the Super Bowl. When Mendez and Minerd joined Ethel Kennedy for a personal lunch, Mendez once recalled, “she fell in love with me…. We talked about immigration, migrant workers, César Chávez.” Minerd at least once described Mendez as his personal assistant. Minerd’s courtship occasionally involved outlandish gifts (he once arranged for Sharon Stone to record a message on Mendez’s mobile phone). Another friend, the financier Henry Silverman, advised Minerd, “Just marry him,” according to a pal. Finally Minerd followed that advice. The couple were wed in 2017 in a Las Vegas ceremony officiated by Wayne Newton. In Mendez, described by a friend as a “nurturer,” Minerd got the adoration and acceptance he craved.

According to her court filings, Chiota befriended Minerd in 2008 through her boyfriend, an executive at Guggenheim Partners. At the time she was a 30-something Venice resident who had studied veterinary technology in college and ran a popular pet care business in Santa Monica. Her wide-set blue eyes and mane of beach hair convey the look of an archetypal California girl, fresh from the waves. A year later, he adopted Gracie, a small, one-year-old rescue dog—a Shiba Inu–Labrador mix . He was quickly obsessed. A friend recalls Minerd rolling around Chiota’s lawn, playing endlessly with Gracie until his pants nearly came down trying to grab her. “As Gracie got older, Scotty got younger,” a friend says. “Gracie gave Scott the unconditional love he never got from his parents.”

The question remains as to why a man worth $400 million seems to have prepared a will just six pages long, filled with typos.

Court documents filed by Chiota’s lawyers contend that Minerd suggested a shared custody arrangement of Gracie. He wanted Chiota to care for the dog in his absence and bring Gracie to his home or office on a moment’s notice, day or night. In exchange for this, Minerd would buy a house for Chiota to live in at a location halfway between his home and his Guggenheim office. She found such a place: a 1940s one-story white stucco home in Venice. Minerd bought it for $1.1 million, paid the carrying costs, and drew up a “sham lease” for tax purposes, according to her filing. Chiota maintained the property and paid utilities. She has lived in the house rent-free for a decade; her court documents claim that Minerd told her the title of the house would be transferred to her upon his death. (The estate’s attorneys contended that she was technically a renter.) The Venice home is held in a limited liability company Minerd created (his castle in California was held by Chateau de Gracie LLC).

When his marriage to Mendez hit bumps—apparently over the lack of effort Minerd seemed to be putting into their relationship, says a friend—Minerd broke down crying. Had they broken up, Mendez would not have been destitute. According to a friend, their prenuptial agreement called for Mendez to receive a hefty settlement. But Mendez didn’t want to leave Minerd. He wanted their marriage to succeed. Chiota intervened, telling Minerd to take Mendez on a proper date, not to a business event. The couple reconciled as Minerd came to trust Chiota on other personal matters. As Gracie aged, Minerd asked Chiota to arrange for the dog to be cloned, a court document says. He swore her to secrecy. Pet cloning is a wildly contentious issue in California and elsewhere. So Chiota made the deposit for the $50,000 procedure, using transferred funds, on Minerd’s behalf, just before his death. Gracie, apparently, was never copied.

In June 2021, a court filing of Figueroa’s says, Minerd mentioned the 24/7 business arrangement he had with Chiota. He now wanted the same with Figueroa. In return for catering to Minerd’s needs around the clock and giving up his other clients and business, he would pay Figueroa $160,000 annually and buy a $4.2 million home in nearby Carlsbad for him to live in. In that filing, Figueroa claimed that if he agreed, Minerd promised to bequeath the home to him in his will. A second home, south of Yosemite, would also be part of the deal.

What does Minerd’s will say about the claims of his two friends? Not a thing. There is no mention of the homes Chiota and Figueroa say they were promised. Instead, they separately faced eviction. In a court document, Chiota’s lawyers say she suspects the will may not be authentic. The estate’s legal team includes superlawyer Eric V. Rowen, who repped Britney Spears in her conservator fight and scored a winning verdict for Katy Perry in a real estate dispute. In an early filing, the lawyers suggested that if Chiota’s “tactics” continued, she could be an extortionist, slowing administration of the estate with court filings to extract a settlement.

The fact that the will was filed in Nevada has largely kept it off the media’s radar. Attorneys for the estate redacted the will in public filings, blacking out beneficiaries and what percentage of the estate they’ll receive—even redacting the reference to who gets Gracie. In a declaration, a lawyer in the case contends this is necessary “given the highly sensitive and private nature of Mr. Minerd’s estate.”

The question remains as to why a man worth $400 million seems to have prepared a will just six pages long, filled with typos. This seeming lack of attention to executing the will doesn’t worry Tasha K. Dickinson, senior partner at Day Pitney in West Palm Beach, Florida, which handles high net worth estate planning. “Scott Minerd’s will may have been a Band-Aid while he contemplated a more robust estate plan,” she says. “No one plans to die at 63.” There are no affidavits accompanying the two witnesses who signed the will (though not necessarily required), and there are no printed names below their signatures, which are illegible. The will was executed in Los Angeles County, but a source confirmed to Vanity Fair that Minerd appears to have been in Rancho Santa Fe [in San Diego County] that day. A filing from the estate offers a potentially simple explanation for some of these oddities: Minerd himself drafted the will. The attorneys have worked to administer the estate as privately as possible, asking that beneficiaries sign forms agreeing not to require an inventory of the estate and requesting court permission (later given) to sell an unnamed artwork of Minerd’s to a secret buyer for an undisclosed price. Neither Fedoris nor attorneys for the estate have responded to requests for comment.

Minerd’s eclectic tastes were reflected by his possessions. He was said to keep in his safe at the Big House a multiplatinum record, Meteora, by Linkin Park, signed by band members. On a wall behind a door at another house was an original oil portrait of George Washington; in a closet, a cast of the life mask of Abraham Lincoln. There is also Minerd’s collection of Charles Schulz art. He possessed several hundred pieces of the illustrator’s work. His collection was so large that a three-week exhibition of it appeared at Laguna College of Art + Design, including some of the most valuable storyboards and animation cels from “Peanuts” holiday specials.

In September a Los Angeles court denied Chiota’s request to open a second, or ancillary, probate, and to be named administrator of the estate. But she’s continuing her fight in the courts, as is Figueroa. “The estate has attempted to evict Alex from the homes he claims Scott intended to give him,” says his attorney, Edmond E. Salem. “We’ll be challenging the Nevada court’s jurisdiction over Scott’s assets in California.”

Minerd had a dream one night, says another longtime friend, the Reverend Andy Bales, the former president and chief executive of Union Rescue Mission in LA, the city’s oldest mission and homeless shelter. He told Bales he dreamed about the homeless women and children he had met on a recent visit to the nonprofit’s transitional housing facility. Suddenly, they were not at the shelter but in homes with beautiful, sweeping gardens, bordered by white picket fences. A short time later Minerd arranged to donate a 700-acre ranch he owned to the mission to be used as transitional housing. After another visit to the mission, when it was grappling with the need to close a facility for single mothers and their kids, he wrote a personal check for $212,000 on the spot. In little over a decade, Minerd donated a total of $27 million to the mission, says Bales. “He was the most generous human I’ve ever met.”

The Union Rescue Mission is about to get a few more dollars. Vanity Fair has obtained an unredacted copy of Minerd’s will, revealing that the organization is the single largest beneficiary of his residuary estate, accorded 34 percent of it. This would place it among the largest bequests to a homeless organization in US history.

Mendez will receive $30 million in cash and assets plus 15 percent of the residuary estate. He is also bequeathed ownership of Gracie. Several Christian-related charities, along with Fedoris and Minerd’s nephew Matthew Minerd, will get 5 percent apiece. Three other individuals, including a bodybuilding friend in England, Jason Crow, will each get 1 percent of the estate—according to the unredacted will—once everything is settled.

Beyond philanthropy, Minerd had plans for preserving the resource-rich Arctic. Over the course of a decade, he helped spearhead a protocol respecting the rights of Native Arctic peoples and aided the creation of a $1 trillion inventory of required infrastructure. Two months before his death, he announced plans for a think tank to advance these goals: the Minerd Institution for Arctic Peace and Prosperity. Those plans apparently died with him.

His charity interests brought together the public and private Scott Minerd. Near the end of his life, he seemed to feel greater acceptance and purpose in giving money away than making it. He worked with an NGO to create housing for LGBTI+ citizens in Uganda. As a board member at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, he aided a program helping achieve US protective status for Haitian and Cameroonian refugees. In life, as he once said in an interview, “everybody cries out for understanding. But when you turn it around and you talk to people, at their core, what they really want is to be accepted.”