Ingenuity may land you in the principal's office — and even jail —in one Texas school, but it's earned the admiration of one of the world's leading tech CEOs.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stepped forward on Facebook to give 14 year-old Ahmed Mohamed an attaboy and an open invite to meet Zuckerberg at Facebook's headquarters in California.

You’ve probably seen the story about Ahmed, the 14 year old student in Texas who built a clock and was arrested when he... Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, September 16, 2015

On Wednesday, 14 year-old Ahmed Mohamed quickly built a digital clock as a science project and promptly found himself in trouble with his MacArthur High School teachers, one of whom thought the clock was a bomb. Those fears got Mohamed, who is Muslim, arrested.

The charges were quickly dropped and police and school officials more or less said they were acting out of an abundance of caution. Mohamed's father worried that his son might never have been targeted if he his name weren't "Mohamed" and "because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated."

The incident has turned the young inventor into an online celebrity. The hashtag #IStandWithAhmed has been the lead Twitter trending hashtag, with hundreds of people showing their support for Mohamed by taking pictures of themselves holding clocks.