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I read on Wikipedia:

In 2014, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources". However, as Moustakas' role in discovering the blue LED were significant, there has been controversy about that he did not receive recognition and was left "in the dark" by the Nobel Committee.[9] Following the announcement, the then Managing Director of Boston University's Office of Technology Development tweeted

Nobel Committee gets it wrong on not including BU professor Ted Moustakas as co-inventor of the blue LED.

— Vinit Nijhawan (October 7, 2014)[10]

Despite this, Moustakas and some of the co-inventors remain colleagues. At the 2016 BU ECE symposium, Nakamura gave a speech about blue LEDs, also honoring Moustakas.[11][12]

Why didn't Theodore Moustakas get the Nobel prize?

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    $\begingroup$ Possibly due to the priority controversy that came up in Moustakas's patent compensation lawsuits:"it was suggested that Moustakas and BU were greedy and unethical in seeking to profit from discoveries that preexisted and they had no right to claim." (quoted from MetaFilter). Some other inventors were also arguably overlooked in 2014. $\endgroup$
    – Conifold
    Commented Aug 7 at 21:52
  • $\begingroup$ @Conifold thanks, good point, you're welcome to add it as an answer $\endgroup$
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Commented Aug 7 at 22:14
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    $\begingroup$ The Nobel committee's deliberations are kept secret for 50 years, so 2064 is the earliest that anyone could write a sourced answer to this question. FWIW, "In no case may a prize amount be divided between more than three persons" (§ 4) so when more than 3 people deserve a prize they have to stiff someone. $\endgroup$
    – benrg
    Commented Aug 8 at 0:26
  • $\begingroup$ @benrg RemindMe! 40 years (in the meantime, it's a good answer too!) $\endgroup$
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Commented Aug 8 at 0:39

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I don't know anything about the history of blue LEDs, but I will convert some comments into an answer. (Thanks to Conifold for some links.)

The Nobel committee's deliberations are kept secret for 50 years (Statutes of the Nobel Foundation, § 10), so any answer before the year 2064 can only be speculation.

"In no case may a prize amount be divided between more than three persons" (§ 4), so when there are more than three people deserving of a prize, they have to stiff someone. That happens fairly often, and it probably did happen in 2014. Wikipedia says in its list of Nobel Prize controversies

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics [...] did not recognize the decades of incremental work in developing the LED by other pioneers such as Oleg Losev, Nick Holonyak, and Gertrude Neumark and overlooked a prior claim for invention of the blue LED by RCA materials researcher Herbert Paul Maruska.

and Moustakas isn't even on that list.

The tweet quoted in the question (suggesting Moustakas deserved the prize) was not by a physicist or engineer, but by the managing director of Boston University's Office of Technology Development, which was at the time suing to enforce a patent of Moustakas's related to blue LEDs. Wikipedia's only source other than statements by BU seems to be a MetaFilter post by user bolix, who claims to have been on the jury of one of the patent cases, which decided in BU/Moustakas's favor. Bolix suggested that the existence of that pending case (it was decided in 2015) might have biased the Nobel committee against Moustakas, but it's unclear to me why that would be true. An appeals court seemingly overturned that jury's decision and invalidated the patent (see if you can make more sense of that article than me; it's extremely confusing). Together with the fact that Moustakas's claim to the prize isn't mentioned in Wikipedia's list of Nobel controversies, only in his own Wikipedia article, I wonder if he really didn't deserve it. But as I said I don't know anything about the history of blue LEDs.

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  • $\begingroup$ The three-recipient rule. We know there have been physics papers with hundreds of authors. But there cannot be corresponding Nobel prizes with hundreds of recipients. $\endgroup$
    – Gerald Edgar
    Commented Aug 8 at 15:54
  • $\begingroup$ @GeraldEdgar The Nobel committee has awarded a Prize to organisations (Red Cross, MSF etc) and so could presumably award the prize to - say - the [this-or-that] Collaboration, which would de facto include 100s of recipients. In fact it’s a bit of a shame the committee did not do precisely that for LIGO. Then again, physicists and the institutions where they work are not non-profit NGOs. $\endgroup$
    – ZeroTheHero
    Commented Aug 10 at 12:10
  • $\begingroup$ @ZeroTheHero The statutes say "Each prize-awarding body shall be competent to decide whether the prize it is entitled to award may be conferred upon an institution or association." There are different awarding bodies for different prizes, and they seem to disagree on this point. $\endgroup$
    – benrg
    Commented Aug 10 at 18:03

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