Elon Musk and President Donald Trump beside a Tesla Cybertruck outside the White House, in a photo the White House shared Thursday. Credit: The White House/X
President Donald Trump will present SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk with the National Medal of Science on Thursday in Washington, D.C., during the White House’s Science: A New Golden Age Summit, the White House said this morning.
The White House announced the honors on X at 9 a.m. PT, calling the two medals “the nation’s highest honors for scientific and technological achievement” and naming Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell “and others” among the recipients. It paired the post with a photo of Musk and Trump standing in front of a Cybertruck outside the White House.
The full list of six honorees, and which medal each one gets, was first reported by Fox News on Wednesday and later confirmed to other outlets by the White House:
“The Trump Administration is grateful for the contributions of these incredible leaders in science and technology,” White House assistant press secretary Liz Huston said in a statement. “These recipients are helping ensure America keeps leading the world in innovation.”
According to Fox News, this will be the first time Trump has presented either medal in his first or second term. The president’s public schedule has him at the summit at 1:30 p.m. ET (10:30 a.m. PT) at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, a short drive from the White House, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is streaming the event live on X.
Congress created the National Medal of Science in 1959, and the National Science Foundation runs it. NSF calls it “the highest recognition the nation can bestow on scientists and engineers,” and says it has gone to 529 people since the first one was awarded for 1962. It goes only to individuals. A presidential committee of scientists and engineers reviews peer nominations, and the president makes the final pick.
The National Medal of Technology and Innovation came out of the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act of 1980, was first awarded in 1985 and is administered by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Unlike the science medal, it can go to companies as well as people. Neither SpaceX nor Tesla appears on this year’s list.
The last time these medals were handed out was January 3, 2025, when President Joe Biden honored 14 science laureates and nine technology laureates at the White House, plus Moderna and Pfizer, which got organizational technology medals for their COVID-19 vaccines. That class included Martin Cooper, who led the development of the first handheld mobile phone at Motorola, and CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna. Before that, NSF’s laureate list jumps straight from the 2014 class to 2022.
Musk stands out on a list that has mostly honored university researchers, since his science happens inside companies. He founded SpaceX in 2002, and the company went on to land and reuse orbital-class Falcon 9 boosters, fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station aboard Crew Dragon and build the Starlink satellite network, which now has the largest fleet in orbit. He has led Tesla as CEO since 2008. He is also behind Starship, the fully reusable rocket SpaceX is testing in Texas.
The honor comes a little over a year after Musk’s very public falling-out with the president. He led the Department of Government Efficiency early in Trump’s second term, left in 2025 and then publicly clashed with Trump over the administration’s tax and spending bill. The two have since patched things up, and Thursday’s honor is the most public sign yet of how far that thaw has gone.
The White House still hasn’t posted a recipient list or a press release on whitehouse.gov, and its morning summit fact sheet doesn’t mention the medals at all. NSF’s medal page still lists the 2024 class as its newest laureates. That means there’s no official citation for what Musk is being recognized for, no word on which award year these medals count toward and no detail on whether the presidential nominating committee put his name forward.
Musk’s only public reaction so far is a repost of an earlier White House post that said Trump “honors our great science and technology leaders” today. SpaceX and Tesla haven’t posted about it either.
Some of the other honorees’ companies show up in the summit’s announcements, according to the fact sheet. Nvidia is putting up $1 billion and AMD $500 million toward $2.4 billion in what the White House calls super intelligence tools and compute credits for the administration’s Genesis Mission research effort. Neither SpaceX nor Tesla is on that list of industry partners.
Once the medals are handed out at 10:30 a.m. PT, the citation is the part worth reading, because it will show what the White House thinks a career of building rockets, cars and satellites has added to science.
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