The paperwork cleared on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday morning one of the most recognizable names in American entertainment belonged to a sovereign wealth fund in Riyadh. Electronic Arts — the company behind EA Sports FC, Madden NFL, Battlefield, The Sims and Apex Legends — stopped trading on the NASDAQ on August 4, 2026, closing a $55 billion take-private deal that stands as the largest leveraged buyout in corporate history. Not the largest in gaming. The largest, full stop.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund now owns 93.4% of EA. Silver Lake holds 5.5%. Affinity Partners, the firm founded by Jared Kushner, holds 1.1%. That’s the whole cap table. After 35 years as a publicly traded company, EA answers to three shareholders and roughly $20 billion in debt.
How the Deal Actually Came Together
The consortium announced its intentions on September 29, 2025, offering $210 per share in cash — a 25% premium on EA’s $168.50 close from four days earlier. Shareholders were never going to say no to that, and they didn’t: roughly 99% of votes cast at a December 22, 2025 special meeting approved the transaction.
The long stretch after that was regulatory. Antitrust reviews in Europe and Brazil, then the one everyone was actually watching — CFIUS, the U.S. committee that screens foreign investment in American companies for national security implications. A foreign government taking outright ownership of a major U.S. media company is exactly the kind of transaction that body exists to examine. Clearance landed on July 30, 2026, about a month behind the original timeline. Closing followed five days later.
The Numbers That Matter
| Deal Component | Detail |
|---|---|
| Total transaction value | $55 billion |
| Price per share | $210, all cash |
| Premium at announcement | 25% |
| Equity contributed | $36.4 billion |
| Debt financing | ~$20 billion |
| PIF ownership | 93.4% |
| Silver Lake ownership | 5.5% |
| Affinity Partners ownership | 1.1% |
| EA FY2026 GAAP net revenue | ~$7.5 billion |
| Previous LBO record | $45 billion (TXU Energy, 2007) |
PIF had already been a minority EA investor for more than five years, holding about 9.9% — a stake worth roughly $5.2 billion at the deal price. It rolled that over and wrote a fresh check of around $29 billion to get to full control. For context on how unusual that is: sovereign funds typically take passive minority positions in deals this size. This one bought the whole building.
Nothing Changes, Says EA. The Debt Says Otherwise.
Andrew Wilson stays on as Chairman and CEO. Redwood City stays the headquarters. The official line from Wilson was that EA enters this chapter from a position of strength, with partners who share its ambition, and that the company will invest boldly and accelerate innovation. Silver Lake’s Egon Durban was more specific about where that investment goes — heavy spending on AI, both in development pipelines and in the player-facing experience.
Wilson also reshuffled his executive bench on day one. Cam Weber, who ran EA Sports and turned FC and the American football franchises into year-round revenue machines, is now President and Chief Studios Officer, overseeing every studio and franchise in the portfolio. David Tinson, previously the company’s top marketing and communications executive, becomes President and COO. Read the org chart and the strategy is not subtle: the person who built EA’s most reliable annualized cash engine is now in charge of everything else.
Then came the part that landed harder than the closing itself. EA has told its debt investors it intends to cut $700 million in annual costs, including $170 million categorized as “organizational efficiencies.” Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier translated that phrase the way anyone who has covered this industry would: layoffs, at scale.
The math explains the urgency. EA’s annual EBITDA sits around $1.5 billion. That covers interest payments on a $20 billion debt load, but not comfortably, and not with much room for a franchise that underperforms. A publisher with a slate that runs on three-to-five-year development cycles now has quarterly-grade financial pressure attached to decisions whose results won’t ship until the back half of the decade.
Who’s Most Exposed
EA has already been trimming. Between 300 and 400 roles went in 2025, including roughly 100 at Apex Legends studio Respawn. In March 2026, undisclosed cuts hit the Battlefield studio cluster — Criterion, DICE, Motive and Ripple Effect. EA has not confirmed a headcount, timeline, or studio list for whatever comes next, so the scale remains genuinely unknown.
But the logic of a debt-financed buyout points in an obvious direction. Franchises with predictable annual revenue — EA Sports FC, Madden, College Football, F1 — are the assets servicing the loan. Studios without a recent commercial hit are the ones with the thinnest cover. BioWare, which hasn’t delivered a breakout in over a decade, has been the subject of internal anxiety since the deal was first announced. Lapsed properties sitting in the vault are unlikely to get a revival budget in this environment.
The Executives Did Fine
One detail that hasn’t helped the mood inside the company: the buyout converted vested and unvested executive stock into cash. Per pre-close SEC filings, Wilson’s payout was estimated around $105.9 million. Laura Miele stood to collect roughly $44.4 million, CFO Stuart Canfield about $33.4 million, and chief people officer Mala Singh and chief legal officer Jacob Schatz around $24.6 million apiece. Those figures were public before closing, which is why “position of strength” has been getting a rough reception on developer social feeds this week.
What Saudi Arabia Gets Out of It
PIF frames this through Vision 2030, the kingdom’s program to build an economy that doesn’t depend on oil. Entertainment and sport are two of its designated growth pillars, and the fund’s deputy governor for international investments, Turqi Alnowaiser, has described gaming as among the fastest-growing sectors globally.
The EA purchase completes a portfolio that was already substantial. PIF wholly owns Savvy Games Group and holds equity positions in Nintendo, Capcom and Nexon. Now it owns the publisher that controls the world’s biggest football video game outright — a company whose products reach hundreds of millions of people a year, most of whom will never think about who signs the checks.
That reach is precisely what critics point to. Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights, press freedom and the treatment of LGBTQ+ people has drawn sustained international condemnation, and the kingdom’s rapid expansion across football, golf, boxing, esports and now game publishing has been widely characterized as reputation management purchased at scale. EA employees and players raising that objection now have no shareholder meeting to raise it at.
What This Means
For most people, nothing visible happens this year. EA Sports FC ships. Madden ships. The Sims keeps running. Games in production stay in production, because canceling a title three years deep destroys more value than it saves.
The real change is structural, and it shows up later. A private company doesn’t publish quarterly results, doesn’t take analyst questions, and doesn’t have to explain a monetization decision to anyone outside three investors. Combine that opacity with a $20 billion obligation and a stated $700 million cost-reduction target, and the incentives all bend the same way: lean harder on proven franchises, monetize existing audiences more aggressively, use AI to compress development costs, and take fewer swings on anything unproven.
EA was not exactly a risk-taking studio before this. It’s now a company where risk-taking has become structurally expensive. The people who should be watching closest aren’t the ones who play FC every year — that game will be fine. It’s everyone hoping EA still makes something that isn’t a sequel.
