From auction blocks to Trump’s hands: The Nobel medal has been sold before for millions

In 2022, Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov auctioned his Nobel Peace Prize for a record-breaking $103.5 million to raise money for Ukrainian child refugees. In 2014, James Watson sold his for over $4 million, having been awarded the medal decades earlier for codiscovering the structure of DNA.

The Nobel Prize has become the focus of an ethical debate about who gets to claim it after María Corina Machado, Venezuela's opposition leader, offered to share hers with 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 18-karat 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.

Also read: Trump finally gets a Nobel? Venezuela's Machado 'presents' peace prize medal to US President

Francis Crick, who was awarded the prize with Watson, received over $2 million for his medal. The Nobel Peace Prize awarded in 1936 to Carlos Saavedra Lamas, a former foreign minister of Argentina, sold for $1.1 million in 2014.

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

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

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

On Thursday, 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.

But it was not immediately clear if she had given Trump the actual prize and if he had accepted it.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.