Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight, has said he’s likely leaving Disney amid a round of layoffs impacting his staff.
Nate Silver gained fame for creating FiveThirtyEight, a political analysis website that attained a degree of success predicting political outcomes. The site eventually branched out into sports, using its analytics to predict winners and losers, being acquired by ESPN in 2013. The site was later transferred to ABC.
According to a tweet by Silver, he doesn’t expect to remain at the company once his contract expires this summer.
Layoffs hit FiveThirtyEight particularly hard today, with deputy managing editor Chadwick Matlin, business ops manager Vanessa Diaz, senior audience editor Meena Ganesan, senior science reporter Maggie Koerth, senior designer Emily Scherer, and sports editor Neil Paine all tweeting news of their layoffs.