The biggest LBO ever will take one of America’s most storied game makers off the public markets — and deeper into geopolitics.
Electronic Arts is leaving Wall Street in the kind of fashion EA likes to script for its sports franchises: a splashy, all‑cash win at a record price. A consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners will buy the publisher of Madden NFL, The Sims, and Battlefield for $55 billion, paying shareholders $210 a share — the largest leveraged buyout on record, subject to approvals. The deal includes roughly $36 billion of equity and $20 billion in debt financing committed by JPMorgan, and is expected to close in EA’s first fiscal quarter of 2027, with Andrew Wilson staying on as CEO and the company remaining in Redwood City, California, according to company statements.
This is not just a business story. It’s a governance story, a labor story, and a soft‑power story. Taking EA private with heavy Saudi backing puts one of the most influential culture factories on earth — interactive entertainment — squarely at the intersection of global politics and American institutions.
A Mega‑Deal With Mega‑Implications
- The price and structure: $210 per share in cash, a ~25% premium to pre‑deal chatter, with $20 billion of debt and a 45‑day window for competing offers, per CNBC.
- The buyers: Saudi PIF (already a major gaming investor), private‑equity giant Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners, run by former White House adviser Jared Kushner. The package eclipses any prior LBO.
- The continuity pitch: EA says it keeps its HQ and CEO; the message is stability even as ownership flips.
Investors cheered, because of course they did; this is a premium exit with a big‑bank debt package. But customers and employees don’t get a special dividend. They get the consequences.
Saudi Soft Power Meets America’s Play Button
PIF isn’t buying EA because it loves RPGs. It’s buying cultural distribution at planetary scale. Gaming is the world’s largest entertainment sector by revenue and time spent; EA operates live services that shape daily social spaces as much as they sell content. When a sovereign wealth fund with a documented sports‑washing strategy gains outsized influence over those spaces, democratic societies should ask basic questions: what happens to creative risk when the patron is also a geopolitical actor? What happens to moderation decisions inside global multiplayer environments after a controversial incident? Who decides how Middle East politics, LGBTQ characters, or labor rights show up in a next‑gen Sims?
The concern isn’t that a switch gets flipped and content turns propagandistic. It’s the subtler gravity of ownership: the meeting that gets canceled, the storyline that gets “de‑prioritized,” the development budget that moves away from contentious themes. As CNN notes, the deal is explicitly funded by Saudi Arabia alongside Kushner’s Affinity Partners. The politics aren’t incidental; they’re in the term sheet.
Private Equity’s Playbook vs. Player Communities
The second risk vector is financial. LBOs load companies with debt and demand cash flow. EA has a robust live‑services engine in sports and Apex Legends, but growth has been choppy industry‑wide post‑pandemic. Cost discipline under private ownership often means the R word: restructuring. EA already cut jobs in 2024 and 2025; private equity tends not to err on the side of bigger R&D budgets and longer creative cycles.
Games are weird, in the best way: they need long incubation, tolerance for flops, and the occasional bonkers idea that dies three times before it lives. Levered balance sheets push toward safer bets and annualized franchises. That protects EA Sports but imperils the weirder, risk‑on parts of the portfolio that make a publisher culturally relevant over decades.
Consolidation’s Endgame
The EA transaction caps a decade of consolidation: Microsoft swallowed Activision Blizzard, Take‑Two picked up Zynga, Embracer went on a tear (and then a diet). Fewer listed publishers means less transparency, less scrutiny, and fewer independent homes for creators. It also shifts bargaining power away from labor in an industry already struggling with crunch, contract precarity, and whiplash layoffs. The Guardian’s early analysis underlines the historic scale and the likely operational freedom that comes with going private — code for decisions away from public‑market glare.
For regulators who spent the Microsoft‑Activision saga worrying about cloud gaming market share, here’s a different challenge: foreign influence in core cultural infrastructure. CFIUS and allies in Europe should treat gaming platforms as they increasingly are — quasi‑public squares for a generation — and examine ownership and governance accordingly.
The Kushner Variable
Affinity Partners isn’t just another fund; it’s chaired by a figure whose family remains central to American politics. That doesn’t make the deal illegal; it does make it awkward. If you’re an EA developer building a politically sensitive storyline, do you trust that the chain of command is insulated from the partisan minefield? If you’re a regulator, do you build explicit guardrails to keep cultural and political content decisions independent from the capital stack? These are design choices as much as legal ones — and they’ll matter.
What Players Should Watch
- Live‑service priorities: Expect more resources funneled to EA Sports FC, Madden, and Ultimate Team‑like mechanics that throw off steady cash. That’s the debt talking.
- Battlefield and Sims: Big bets with cultural heat but development risk. Will private owners accept delays or scope changes to get them right?
- Labor and studios: Headcount and studio autonomy will be the canary. If cuts arrive, innovation will narrow.
- Governance disclosures: Even as a private company, EA can voluntarily publish transparency reports on content moderation and political influence. It should.
A Better Way To Build Durable IP
Progressives have argued that democratic resilience isn’t just about elections; it’s about who owns the spaces where culture is made. If you believe games are the dominant medium of our time, then the EA deal is a test: can we build corporate governance that respects creative independence, worker voice, and global audiences — even under private, foreign‑aligned ownership?
Here’s the minimum: a binding, public charter for editorial independence; independent trust‑level oversight for moderation; labor agreements that set humane standards across studios; and a commitment to publish annual transparency reports. None of that requires an act of Congress. It requires owners who understand that the most valuable asset they just bought is trust.
EA’s new backers say they’re here to “unlock new opportunities.” If that means more great games, more inclusive worlds, and fewer cynical monetization loops, players will cheer. If it means financial engineering wrapped in a glossy trailer, they’ll notice that too.
For now, note the headline facts — $55 billion, $210 per share, record LBO — and the subtext: in 2025, control of culture scales doesn’t just happen in Hollywood or on social media. It happens on the loading screen.