A Nobel Prize You Can Sell: How Much Is the Most Expensive One Worth?

[Financial News] As it has been reported that last year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, handed her prize to U.S. President Donald Trump, attention is turning to the value of the Nobel Prize.
On the 15th (local time), The New York Times (NYT) reported that, although the Nobel Committee prohibits the prize from being transferred, shared, or reclaimed by others, Nobel Prize medals have in fact been sold at auction.
The most expensive case at auction came in 2022, when Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov’s 2021 Nobel Peace Prize medal was sold for 103.5 million dollars (about 1.524 trillion won) to help refugee children from Ukraine.
James Dewey Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the structure of DNA, sold his medal in 2014 for 4 million dollars.
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel that John Forbes Nash Jr. received in 1994 was sold in 2019 for less than 1 million dollars.
Since the 1980s, Nobel Prize medals have been made from 18-karat recycled gold.
Visiting the White House that day, Machado told reporters that, as a token of appreciation for Trump’s commitment to Venezuela’s freedom, “I awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the president of the United States.”
Trump also wrote on social media that Machado had told him to keep the Nobel Peace Prize she received last year.
News media in the United States reported that, because the prize cannot be formally transferred, it was given to him in the form of a gift.

jjyoon@fnnews.com Yoon Jae-joon Reporter