'So Much Hard Work Erased': Nate Silver Vents Disney Told Him to 'Get Lost' Before Deleting FiveThirtyEight's Archive [View all]

Source: MEDIAite

May 19th, 2026, 4:36 pm


Nate Silver eulogized his old website FiveThirtyEight in a lengthy blog post on Tuesday and lamented there was “so much hard work erased” when Disney recently decided to wipe the political data outlet’s entire archive. How much hard work? Silver calculated 200,000 hours, or about 23 years of combined work.

“During the Disney era, which lasted about 10 years, FiveThirtyEight published about 20 stories a week. Let’s say that each story took about 20 hours to produce between research, writing, graphics, and editing,” Silver explained. “Do the math, and that works out to about 200,000 person-hours of work that ABC News just deleted.”

That was part of Silver’s massive 4,900-word breakdown of the website’s complicated history on his Silver Bulletin Substack account. Silver went through the website’s history and outlined both his beefs with Disney and ABC, as well as some mistakes he said he made as well. He also expanded on Disney’s decision to erase FiveThirtyEight’s entire web history, which Silver said last week was a move made by a “bunch of a**holes.”

Before deleting the site’s history, Silver said he approached Disney “a year or two ago” about buying the archive. “I’m probably the logical high bidder, though the value is rapidly depreciating as what’s left of the site falls into disrepair. At a minimum, we’d restore the archive, with prominent links to Silver Bulletin,” Silver explained. That plan was shot down, though. “We were told to basically get lost: ABC was annoyed with my critical public comments about their management of FiveThirtyEight,” Silver explained.

Read more: https://www.mediaite.com/media/so-much-hard-work-erased-nate-silver-vents-disney-told-him-to-get-lost-before-deleting-fivethirtyeights-archive/