President Trump awarded the National Medal of Science to Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sergey Brin, and Lisa Su on Thursday, and gave the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Michael Dell and Satya Nadella — putting the country's highest scientific honors on six people who actually built things, employed Americans, and pushed U.S. technological leadership forward.
The ceremony at the White House's "Science: A New Golden Age Summit" recognized a different kind of laureate than the usual roster. Past winners have mainly been academics and research scientists, according to the Associated Press. This time, Trump honored builders and founders — the people who turn research into companies, factories, and jobs.
Musk's citation credits his engineering work in space exploration, intelligent systems, communications, and American manufacturing. Trump called him "our modern-day Thomas Edison," The Hill reported. Huang was recognized for turning the graphics processing unit into a general-purpose computing architecture. Su's citation names her work on processor architecture that powered the world's first exascale supercomputer. Brin's honors his foundational algorithms for information retrieval. Dell's citation credits him with advancing personal and enterprise computing. Nadella's names Microsoft's renewal for the cloud era and the infrastructure behind what the administration calls "super intelligence."
Five of the six honorees were born outside the United States — Musk in South Africa, Brin in Russia, Huang and Su in Taiwan, and Nadella in India. Only Dell was born in Texas. "I was an immigrant, and my parents brought us here to pursue the American dream," Huang told NBC News.
Trump called the group "national treasures" and compared them to his uncle, John Trump, an MIT professor who received the National Medal of Science in 1983. "We live in an age of American wonders and technological marvels, and with the help of the brilliant men and women here today, we will always be on top," Trump said, according to NBC News.
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director Michael Kratsios joined Trump on stage. "Innovators like these six awardees are the architects of the future," Kratsios said.
Each of the six has donated money to Trump or to Republican campaigns and causes, CNBC reported. And at the same summit, AI companies pledged $2.4 billion in credits and AI tools for federal science — including Nvidia's $1 billion commitment.
The timing of the ceremony carried an irony the press was quick to note. Hours before the medals were handed out, Vice President JD Vance announced the Labor Department was suspending Microsoft from the PERM program, the first step in sponsoring foreign workers for green cards. Vance was asked about the timing. "We're going to continue to support Microsoft and have a great relationship with Microsoft," he said.
Congress established the National Medal of Science in 1959; 529 people had received it before Thursday, according to the National Science Foundation. The technology medal dates to 1980, with more than 240 laureates in its history.
The establishment press will downplay these honors or find a way to attack them. When Trump installs defense-industry insiders at the Pentagon, the same outlets yawn. When he honors the people who built SpaceX, Nvidia, and AMD — companies that actually advance American power — the story gets framed as transactional. The open question is whether this administration can hold both threads at once: celebrating the immigrant builders who made American tech dominant, while tightening the very immigration pathways that brought five of these six men here in the first place.
