™Elon Musk and Nvidia's Jensen Huang Win the National Medal of Science
Lisa Su and Sergey Brin also got the science medal, while Michael Dell and Satya Nadella took the technology prize.
Nvidia's account on X congratulated its CEO, Jensen Huang, on Thursday afternoon for winning the National Medal of Science. Then it kept going, adding a guest list.
Congratulations to our CEO @JensenHuang on receiving the National Medal of Science for advancing GPU computing to power scientific breakthroughs. And to fellow honorees Elon Musk, Lisa Su, Michael Dell, Satya Nadella, and Sergey Brin. https://t.co/GdDuYmdyR2
— (@) 2026-10-08T20:20:16.000Z
The post went on to salute "fellow honorees Elon Musk, Lisa Su, Michael Dell, Satya Nadella, and Sergey Brin." By Saturday, X counted more than 444,000 views and 805 reposts. President Donald Trump handed out the medals Thursday at the White House's Science: A New Golden Age summit, according to the White House. And the list says a lot about where the administration thinks science happens now.
Start with the plumbing, because the post lumps everyone together. There are two medals here, not one. The science medal, given by presidents since 1963, is meant for outstanding contributions to science. The National Medal of Technology and Innovation, around since 1985, honors innovators who've strengthened the economy and daily life.
Four of the six got the science medal: Huang, Musk, Brin and Su. Dell and Nadella got the technology one.
Then read the citations, which do the real explaining. Huang's credits him with turning the graphics chip into a general-purpose computer that now drives breakthroughs in both scientific computing and super intelligence. Nvidia's post kept the science and dropped the super intelligence.
Su's citation points to chiplet designs that powered the world's first exascale supercomputer. Brin's honors foundational algorithms for finding and sorting information. Musk's, on a science medal, cites "engineering achievements of extraordinary ambition and scale" in space, communications and intelligent systems.
The technology citations lean even harder on the corner office. Dell's praises his business management skills, and Nadella's credits him with reviving a major American tech company for the cloud era and building the giant data centers that, the White House says, trained and deployed American super intelligence.
That tilt matches the event's premise. The summit was built around Science: A New Golden Age, a July report from White House science adviser Michael Kratsios. The White House bills it as the first full rethink of American science since Vannevar Bush's 1945 report, Science: The Endless Frontier, and one of its central observations is that industry now drives a bigger share of research.
The release ties the medals to that idea directly, crediting the six with breakthroughs in parallel computing and chip design and with the business leadership behind hyperscale infrastructure, from the U.S. to orbit. Put plainly, a medal meant for contributions to science has gone to the people who build the machines research runs on.
Kratsios didn't leave much room for doubt about how the administration sees them. Innovators like these six, he said in the release, "are the architects of the future."
Source: X, retrieved October 10, 2026. Other sources: whitehouse.gov.
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