Nate Silver blasts ex-bosses at ABC for deleting – Business News
Nate Silver slammed his former ABC News employers as “a bunch of a–holes” on Friday after the Disney-owned community took down all the archives of his now-defunct FiveThirtyEight information website.
Silver — the info geek who rose to prominence by utilizing statistical fashions to precisely predict the outcomes of the 2008 presidential election and plenty of Senate races — referred to ABC News executives as a “bunch of a–holes” on Friday.
He shared a visceral response 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.”
Nate Silver blasted ABC News after the Disney-owned community scrubbed archived FiveThirtyEight articles from the web. Bloomberg by way of Getty Images
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 tv community.
In a follow-up X post, Silver claimed that he tried to buy the positioning back from ABC News however was rebuffed.
FiveThirtyEight gained fame after appropriately predicting the winner in all 50 states and Washington, DC, within the 2012 presidential election. fivethirtyeight
“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 remark from ABC.
ABC News has now taken all FiveThirtyEight articles utterly offline. They now redirect to abcnews dot com/politics. A unnecessary erasure of hundreds of pages of data.— Nathaniel Rakich (@baseballot) May 15, 2026
FiveThirtyEight was based by Silver in 2008 as an unbiased election-forecasting weblog named after the quantity of electors within the Electoral College. Along together with his spectacular 2008 exhibiting, Silver appropriately predicted the winner of all 50 states and Washington, DC, within the 2012 presidential election.
The model modified palms a number of occasions because it grew into a marquee data-journalism operation.
The New York Times licensed FiveThirtyEight in 2010 earlier than Disney-owned ESPN acquired it in 2013 and relaunched it as a broader data-driven information and sports activities website. 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 mentioned it might retain the FiveThirtyEight model even because it restructured the operation, whereas Silver informed employees the cuts would “substantially impact FiveThirtyEight.”
After Silver’s departure, ABC folded the positioning more tightly into its political protection and ultimately retired the standalone FiveThirtyEight area altogether. In March of final 12 months, Disney shut down the remaining FiveThirtyEight operation as half of one other spherical of cuts.
