The interesting thing about his experience, though, is that he had the clout (and foresight?) to craft the deal so that he was merely licensing his models to Disney, and ever since he left, Disney has not been able to use them (well, for some of the sports-related ones, Disney was permitted to keep a copy, but not benefit from further work on it).

So Silver still seems to have the rights to the important stuff that made FiveThirtyEight what it was. He can (and has been) more or less building a new version of it, using all his old IP as a base.