Nate Silver slammed his former ABC News employers as “a bunch of a–holes” on Friday after the Disney-owned network took down the entire archives of his now-defunct FiveThirtyEight news site.
Silver — the data geek who rose to prominence by using statistical models to accurately predict the results of the 2008 presidential election and many Senate races — referred to ABC News executives as a “bunch of a–holes” on Friday.
He shared a visceral reaction to an X post from former FiveThirtyEight colleague Nathaniel Rakich, who wrote: “ABC News has now taken all FiveThirtyEight articles completely offline. They now redirect to abcnews dot com/politics. A needless erasure of thousands of pages of knowledge.”
The Post confirmed Rakich’s claims.
“Honestly what a bunch of a–holes,” Silver wrote in response to Rakich. He included the @ABC tag, leaving no doubt that he was aiming his ire at the television network.
In a follow-up X post, Silver claimed that he tried to buy the site back from ABC News but was rebuffed.
“BTW, I approached ABC about buying back the former FiveThirtyEight IP [intellectual property], and they said they wouldn’t sell at any price because I’d criticized their management of the brand,” Silver wrote on Friday.
“Costing Disney shareholders $$ b/c of their vindictiveness,” he added.
The Post has sought comment from ABC.
FiveThirtyEight was founded by Silver in 2008 as an independent election-forecasting blog named after the number of electors in the Electoral College. Along with his impressive 2008 showing, Silver correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states and Washington, DC, in the 2012 presidential election.
The brand changed hands several times as it grew into a marquee data-journalism operation.
The New York Times licensed FiveThirtyEight in 2010 before Disney-owned ESPN acquired it in 2013 and relaunched it as a broader data-driven news and sports site. In 2018, Disney shifted FiveThirtyEight from ESPN to ABC News.
Silver exited ABC News in 2023 during sweeping Disney layoffs that gutted the FiveThirtyEight newsroom.
At the time, ABC said it would retain the FiveThirtyEight brand even as it restructured the operation, while Silver told staff the cuts would “substantially impact FiveThirtyEight.”
After Silver’s departure, ABC folded the site more tightly into its political coverage and eventually retired the standalone FiveThirtyEight domain altogether. In March of last year, Disney shut down the remaining FiveThirtyEight operation as part of another round of cuts.
