Machado gives Trump her Nobel: Medal has been sold before for millions of dollars

NEW YORK – In 2022, Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov auctioned his Nobel Peace Prize for a record-breaking US$103.5 million (S$133.2 million) to raise money for Ukrainian child refugees. In 2014, biologist James Watson sold his for more than US$4 million, having been awarded the medal decades earlier for co-discovering the structure of DNA.

The Nobel Prize has become the focus of an ethical debate about who gets to claim it after Venezuela’s opposition leader Maria Corina Machado offered to share hers with US President Donald Trump despite the Nobel Committee’s stipulation that the

prize cannot be revoked, shared or transferred

.

It can, however, be sold for millions of dollars.

Since the 1980s, the Nobel medal has been made with 18K recycled gold, according to the Nobel Committee. And, in a few auctions across the prize’s history, it has fetched a wide range of prices.

Biophysicist Francis Crick received more than US$2 million for the medal awarded to him in 1962. The Nobel Peace Prize awarded in 1936 to former Argentinian foreign minister Carlos Saavedra Lamas sold for US$1.1 million in 2014.

But not all attempts to sell the medal have brought staggering returns.

The 1994 medal awarded to mathematician John Nash for his work on game theory sold for under US$1 million in 2019. The 1982 prize awarded to physicist Kenneth Wilson failed to reach a minimum bid of US$450,000 in 2016. And writer William Faulkner’s failed to sell in 2013, after bidding stalled at US$425,000, short of the minimum.

Mr Trump has openly coveted the prize, and Ms Machado dedicated it to him when she received it in October 2025.

On Jan 15, Ms Machado said she had “presented the President of the United States the medal of the Nobel Peace Prize”, describing a moment during a private lunch earlier in the day.

A White House official later confirmed that Mr Trump

intended to keep the medal

. NYTIMES