Nobel laureates sometimes display as much ingenuity when deciding how to spend their prize money as they did on the work that won them the award in the first place.
When Sir Paul Nurse won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2001, he decided to upgrade his motorbike.
A fellow winner in 1993, Richard Roberts, installed a croquet lawn in front of his house. Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek, who won in 2004, said the prize meant “financial independence.”
This year’s awards get under way today, starting with the medicine prize and wrapping up a week later with the economics prize.
Once the frenzied media attention, formal appearances and ceremonies are over, this year’s Nobel laureates will also have to decide how to spend the 8 million kronor (US$1.25) prize money.
And judging from past experience, anything can happen. Sometimes they donate it to charity or scientific research, but that is by no means universal.
Nobel Foundation executive director Lars Heikensten said there were no obvious shopping trends among laureates.
“I think it depends a lot on which country they come from, their personal finances ... what kind of incomes they have when they get the prize, and where they are in life,” he said.
However real estate is a popular option, at least among those willing to reveal what they spend the money on.
More than a million dollars sounds like a lot, but it is often shared between several winners, diluting their Nobel spending power.
Wolfgang Ketterle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who shared the 2001 physics prize with two colleagues, put his share towards a house and his children’s education.
“Since half goes to taxes in the US, there was nothing [more] left,” he said.
Phillip Sharp, the American co-winner of the 1993 medicine prize, decided to splash out on a 100-year-old Federal style house.
Deciding how to spend their money can take some time as new laureates are inundated with offers to attend meetings, lectures and inaugurations during their first year.
“I’ve not managed to think about the prize money. There have been great demands on my time,” said Serge Haroche, joint winner of last year’s physics prize, although he said he would probably look into real estate.
For winners of the peace prize the decision is often more clear-cut, as the honor tends to go to politicians, organizations and activists who are under more public scrutiny.
Many, like US President Barack Obama in 2009 and the EU last year, donate to charities.
Others support pet projects: the 2008 winner, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, said he would finance a conflict resolution group he had set up.
Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, who founded the Grameen Bank — which gives loans to lift people out of poverty — said he would fund an eye hospital and a business making affordable food for the poor with his 2006 prize money.
However, there has been one notable exception to the charitable giving.
Then-US president Woodrow Wilson won the prize in 1920, but left it in a Swedish bank to earn interest, apparently because he was concerned about life after retirement in an age when former presidents got no government pension, according to one biography.
On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump weighed in on a pressing national issue: The rebranding of a restaurant chain. Last week, Cracker Barrel, a Tennessee company whose nationwide locations lean heavily on a cozy, old-timey aesthetic — “rocking chairs on the porch, a warm fire in the hearth, peg games on the table” — announced it was updating its logo. Uncle Herschel, the man who once appeared next to the letters with a barrel, was gone. It sparked ire on the right, with Donald Trump Jr leading a charge against the rebranding: “WTF is wrong with Cracker Barrel?!” Later, Trump Sr weighed
SinoPac Financial Holdings Co (永豐金控) is weighing whether to add a life insurance business to its portfolio, but would tread cautiously after completing three acquisitions in quick succession, president Stanley Chu (朱士廷) said yesterday. “We are carefully considering whether life insurance should play a role in SinoPac’s business map,” Chu told reporters ahead of an earnings conference. “Our priority is to ensure the success of the deals we have already made, even though we are tracking some possible targets.” Local media have reported that Mercuries Life Insurance Co (三商美邦人壽), which is seeking buyers amid financial strains, has invited three financial
Artificial intelligence (AI) chip designer Cambricon Technologies Corp (寒武紀科技) plunged almost 9 percent after warning investors about a doubling in its share price over just a month, a record gain that helped fuel a US$1 trillion Chinese market rally. Cambricon triggered the selloff with a Thursday filing in which it dispelled talk about nonexistent products in the pipeline, reminded investors it labors under US sanctions, and stressed the difficulties of ascending the technology ladder. The Shanghai-listed company’s stock dived by the most since April in early yesterday trading, while the market stood largely unchanged. The litany of warnings underscores growing scrutiny of
OUTLOOK: Among the six sub-indices, only the stock market confidence sub-index rose due to strong equity performance and expectations of a US Federal Reserve rate cut Consumer confidence weakened further this month, sliding to its lowest level in two-and-a-half years as households grew increasingly uneasy about the economic outlook, job security and big-ticket spending, a survey by the National Central University showed yesterday. The consumer confidence index fell 1.07 points from last month to 63.31, the weakest number since May 2023, said the university’s Research Center for Taiwan Economic Development (RCTED), which conducts the monthly poll. “Although the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics recently increased Taiwan’s GDP growth forecast for this year to 4.45 percent, consumer sentiment tells a different story,” RCTED director Dachrahn Wu
RSS