Machado gave her Peace Prize to Trump. Can a Nobel be gifted?

Nobel Prizes are traditionally highly coveted and prestigious awards, cherished by recipients and carrying global fame and a hefty financial reward for winners, selected for their outstanding works and contributions.

Arguably the most famous of the prizes set out by Swedish inventor and entrepreneur Alfred Nobel in his will in 1895, is the Peace Prize, which includes an 18-carat gold medal and an award of more than $1 million for an individual or organization most contributing to “fraternity between nations.”

On Thursday, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado gifted hers to President Donald Trump in a meeting at the White House.

Here’s what to know about whether a Nobel Prize can be regifted.

Why did Machado give her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump?

Machado, an opposition leader who spent almost a year in hiding before escaping Venezuela late last year, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October, with the Nobel Committee describing her as “a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness.” While Machado dedicated the prize to the “suffering people of Venezuela” and Trump “for his decisive support of our cause,” the White House accused the committee of placing “politics over peace” in its decision.

But since the U.S. mission to oust Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in early January, Machado appears to have been sidelined by the Trump administration, which publicly backed Maduro’s vice president and questioned Machado’s ability to lead Venezuela.

In an interview with Fox News last week, Machado praised Trump and said she and the Venezuelan people wanted to “share” the prize with him, in an apparent bid to gain favor with the United States.

Trump, who had publicly coveted the prize and claimed to have “solved” a number of international conflicts, accepted the award on Thursday, describing the move as a “wonderful gesture of mutual respect.”

What has the Nobel Committee said about it?

Nobel’s prizes reward outstanding efforts in the fields that he was most involved in during his lifetime: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace, with the first prize awarded in 1901. The prize for economic sciences was added in 1969.

The position of the Norwegian Nobel Committee and the Norwegian Nobel Institute has been clear.

“Once a Nobel Prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, shared or transferred to others,” they said in a statement last week. “The decision is final and stands for all time.”

“A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot,” the Nobel Peace Center wrote on social media Thursday.

Can you sell a Nobel Prize?

The Nobel Peace Prize medals bear the portrait of Alfred Nobel and are engraved with the name of the laureate and the phrase: “Pro pace et fraternitate gentium,” which means, “For the peace and brotherhood of men.”

Until 1980, they were made of 23-carat gold, weighing approximately 200 grams. Since then, they have been made of 18-carat recycled gold and mostly weigh about 175 grams, according to the Nobel Committee.

There have been a handful of occasions where a Nobel Prize medal has been sold.

In 2019, the estate of the late mathematician John F. Nash Jr. – made famous in the 2001 Russell Crowe movie “A Beautiful Mind” – auctioned his medal for the Nobel Prize in economic sciences, which he received in 1994 for his contributions to Game Theory. It went for $735,000 including fees, according to auction house Christie’s.

The medal belonging to Francis Crick, one of three scientists awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology in 1962 for their discovery of the structure of DNA, sold at auction for $2.27 million with fees in 2013. Crick’s granddaughter told the BBC at the time that part of the proceeds of the sale of the medal and some of Crick’s other possessions would go toward funding scientific research.

Co-discoverer James Watson sold his own medal the following year, which was auctioned off at $4.76 million with fees. He also auctioned a handwritten Nobel Prize “Banquet” speech for $365,000 including fees.

More recently, in 2022, Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov sold his Nobel Peace Prize medal for $103.5 million to an anonymous buyer at an auction event in New York, with the proceeds going to support U.N. humanitarian work in Ukraine, Heritage Auctions said in a statement at the time. Muratov, founding editor of the fiercely independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper, shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize with the Philippine journalist Maria Ressa.

Can Nobel Prizes be refused, reconsidered or revoked?

Recipients can refuse a Nobel Prize, but declining “this distinction does not in the least modify the validity of the award,” the Nobel Committee has said.

Author Jean-Paul Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in literature in 1964, stating that he did not want to be “institutionalized” and fearing that it would limit the impact of his writing.

Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho refused the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize jointly awarded to him with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for negotiating the Vietnam peace accord. Le Duc Tho said he felt that peace had not truly been established in Vietnam.

Nobel Prizes cannot be revoked once awarded, according to the committee, as neither Alfred Nobel’s will nor the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation mention any such possibility, it has said.

Choices of recipients are also not reconsidered for the same reasons, it has said. According to the foundation statutes, “No appeals may be made against the decision of a prize-awarding body with regard to the award of a prize.”

Author Ernest Hemingway was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea.” Hemingway, whose novel was set in Cuba, where he lived at the time, said the prize “belongs to Cuba,” where he said his work “was created and conceived,” and he reportedly set the medal at the feet of a shrine at the famed Virgin of Charity of El Cobre church in Cuba.

What happens when winners are controversial?

Janne Haaland Matlary, a politics expert at the University of Oslo, said Machado’s “gimmick is so condescending … that the committee should issue a statement to the effect that she is not a worthy recipient.”

“The committee clearly made an error of judgment about her character,” Matlary said. “But her error does not mean the downfall of the prize. It stands tall as the most coveted prize in the world.”

Nina Graeger, director of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, said she was not aware of any previous instance in which a winner had gifted the medal in this way to someone else. She said if the Nobel Peace Prize were ever to become “a bargaining chip,” the “prestige” of it would “inevitably diminish over time.”

She added that when the prize is awarded to political leaders or heads of state, “there is always a risk that something happens later.”

She cited the example of Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 and later presided over a civil war in his country; Aung San Suu Kyi, the Myanmar activist and politician awarded the prize in 1991 whose international standing collapsed after her response to the Rohingya crisis; and Kissinger, who was jointly awarded the prize alongside Tho for negotiating the Paris Peace Accords, despite the Vietnam War continuing and Kissinger’s involvement in other highly controversial conflicts. Kissinger later sought to return the award, but the committee refused.