President Donald Trump presented the National Medal of Science to Elon Musk at the White House event “Science: The New Golden Age,” and called him “the Thomas Edison of our time.” The same ceremony also honored Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Dell founder Michael Dell.
The source article says that four of the world’s seven richest people were on the stage that day. It also places this medal alongside past recipients such as Claude Shannon, Richard Feynman, and Chien-Shiung Wu, describing the award as one that has, for more than six decades, gone to scientists who changed textbooks. This time, the people on stage were associated with chips, model training, and data-center buildout.
White House preview put Musk first
Hours before the ceremony, the White House’s official X account promoted the event and named Musk first. The image used in that post showed Musk standing with Trump in front of the White House, with a Cybertruck behind them.
The event opened in Washington at 1:30 p.m. Trump began by describing Musk as one of the greatest technology founders in history and said he had turned science fiction into reality across one field after another. He then walked through Musk’s business history in sequence.
According to Trump’s remarks as cited in the article, Musk committed his entire savings to found SpaceX in 2002. In 2008, Falcon 1 reached orbit, becoming the first liquid-fueled rocket developed by a private company to do so. Trump said almost no one believed it would work at the time. Later, he said, the United States no longer had to rely on foreign rockets to send astronauts into space because SpaceX could do the job.
When he turned to Starship and Starlink, Trump used “the biggest ever” repeatedly. He described Starship as the largest rocket ever built and said it could be caught in midair and reused, something he said nobody had seen before. He called Starlink the largest communications satellite network ever built.
Trump also recounted a personal story tied to flooding in North Carolina. He said many areas had become isolated and cut off from communication, and that a governor called to ask whether he knew someone named Elon Musk. Trump said he replied, “I happen to know him.” After one phone call, he said, Starlink equipment reached the scene within hours. Trump said that effort saved hundreds of lives.
Trump also mentioned Tesla and Neuralink. He described Tesla as the first successful new car company in 75 years, and said Neuralink was helping people who could not see, speak, or move to see, speak, and act again. He closed that part of the ceremony by telling Musk: “You are a friend of mine, of course, but you really are a very, very special person.”
Five other tech leaders received the medal
Jensen Huang and CUDA
When Huang’s turn came, Trump first asked the audience to applaud him, then retraced his career path. Trump said Huang worked on microprocessors at AMD early on, handled graphics chips at LSI Logic, and later co-founded Nvidia, beginning with gaming graphics cards.
Trump highlighted Nvidia’s 2006 launch of CUDA, saying that GPUs could then be used for general-purpose computing. He said that at the time few people understood what Huang was talking about, but Huang himself knew exactly where he was going. Trump added that most of the world’s largest supercomputers now run on Nvidia chips. He then said: “Nvidia chips are the backbone of frontier superintelligence, the absolute backbone. The whole world runs on Nvidia now.”
After the ceremony, Nvidia posted congratulations to Huang on X and also congratulated the other five recipients, including rival AMD chief Lisa Su.
Lisa Su and AMD’s return
Trump called Su an “industry pioneer.” He said that while at IBM, she was among the lead scientists who helped replace aluminum with copper in chip interconnects, a change he said boosted chip performance.
After joining AMD, Trump said, she became CEO within two years, “like a rocket.” He said that after taking over, she bet on the Zen architecture and chiplets, helping rebuild AMD into an industry heavyweight. In Trump’s words at the event, AMD’s market value rose from less than $2 billion to more than $1 trillion.
Trump also pointed to Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, describing it as the world’s first exascale supercomputer and saying it runs on AMD chips. He added that Su was the first woman to receive the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal, which the source article describes as the top honor in semiconductors. Trump told her directly: “People always talk about breaking the glass ceiling. You broke it a long time ago.”
Satya Nadella and Microsoft’s cloud role
Trump said Nadella had been a central figure in Microsoft’s transformation for more than 30 years. Before becoming CEO in 2014, he had run research and also managed Microsoft’s cloud platform. The award citation said he helped revive Microsoft in the cloud-computing era.
The article notes that Microsoft began investing in OpenAI in 2019, and that OpenAI’s early large models were trained on dedicated supercomputers built on Microsoft Azure. Trump said Nadella had the foresight to place Microsoft near the front of the line for “superintelligence.”
Sergey Brin, PageRank, and Google
Trump described Brin as a gifted student who earned a bachelor’s degree at 19 and then went to Stanford on a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation. There, Brin and Larry Page created the PageRank algorithm, which sorted web pages by links and eventually became Google.
Trump said that the first time he heard the name Google, he thought someone was joking. But the company permanently changed how people find information and put the world’s knowledge at everyone’s fingertips. The article notes that NSF supported Brin’s path to Stanford and that the same agency handled this medal as well. It also says Brin has now returned to Google and is personally pushing “superintelligence.”
Michael Dell, from dorm room to computing giant
Trump began Dell’s story in a college dorm room. The article says Dell started with $1,000 and an idea at the University of Texas, dropped out at 19, and sold built-to-order computers by phone and mail order. He later launched Turbo PC, described in the report as the first computer designed entirely in-house, bringing customized PCs into households across the country.
Trump also said that Dell and his wife had donated $6.25 billion in “Trump Accounts” for 25 million American children. He added that those children would be wealthier at age 18 and 21 because of it.
“Superintelligence” appeared throughout the ceremony
After praising all six recipients, Trump widened the frame to 250 years of U.S. technological history, from electricity, the light bulb, and the airplane to atomic energy, the personal computer, and the internet. Standing in front of what he called the era of superintelligence, he said: “Nobody can compete with us. Nobody.”
Before the medals were handed out, organizers played a short film about Trump’s uncle. The article says his radar work in World War II guided Allied bombers through the clouds over Normandy. He was named for the 1983 National Medal of Science but died before receiving it in person. Organizers recovered that medal, placed it in a frame, and presented it to Trump.
The source article stresses that the phrase “superintelligence” appeared again and again in the citations. Huang was described as someone “powering breakthroughs in scientific computing and superintelligence.” Nadella’s citation said he had “supported the training and global deployment of American superintelligence.”
The article says this wording was not incidental. Nine days earlier, Trump had signed an executive order under which official federal language would use “superintelligence” in place of “artificial intelligence.” The phrase has now been written directly into the wording of America’s highest scientific honor.
White House also announced $2.4 billion for compute and tools
On the same day as the summit, the White House said the Genesis Project Alliance would commit $2.4 billion to compute and tools. Nvidia pledged $1 billion, AMD pledged $500 million, OpenAI pledged $200 million, and Anthropic and Google each pledged $150 million.
The article points out that the leaders of the two biggest contributors among those companies were on the medal stage. OpenAI and Anthropic also contributed funds, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic co-founder Dario were not among the recipients. Trump did not mention either company during his speech, according to the report.
After the ceremony ended, “YMCA” played in the venue. Trump said it was the biggest day for science and technology. The article closes by noting that Congress created the medal 67 years ago for scientists and engineers. This time, it was placed around the necks of people building chips, server capacity, and AI training systems. In the framing of the report, “superintelligence” has become a U.S. national project.