EA's $55 Billion Sale to Saudi Arabia Just Closed. The Debt Math Doesn't Work Without More Layoffs — and I Don't Think EA Is Hiding That Anymore

Let me start with the number that actually matters, because it's the one buried under every celebratory press release about this deal: EA now owes roughly $20 billion, and the interest on it alone may cost more per year than the entire company makes in profit. Everything else — the ownership percentages, the Nasdaq delisting, the carefully worded statements about "creative independence" — is decoration around that one fact. On August 4, Electronic Arts completed its sale to a consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, ending 35 years as a publicly traded company in the largest leveraged buyout in history. I've spent the past few weeks reading through the SEC filings, the bond terms, and the layoff history that led up to this moment, and I'll say up front: I don't think this is the story of a struggling company getting rescued. I think it's the story of a very healthy company being loaded with debt it will spend years trying to service, and the people who'll feel that first are not the executives who signed the deal.

What actually closed on August 4

Here's the plain version, stripped of the spin both sides put on it. On September 29, 2025, EA agreed to be bought out by a consortium made up of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, the private equity firm Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners, the investment firm founded by Jared Kushner. Shareholders were offered $210 in cash per share, a roughly 25% premium over EA's trading price the Friday before news broke, and a premium over the company's own all-time high. Shareholders approved it on December 22, 2025. Regulators in the EU and the U.S. cleared it by July 30, 2026. The deal closed four days later, on August 4, and EA's common stock — which had traded on Nasdaq under one ticker or another since 1991 — stopped trading and was delisted. For the first time in 35 years, Electronic Arts answers to no public shareholders at all, only to the three firms that just bought it and the banks that financed the purchase.

I want to be fair about the scale of this before I get into why I think it's a bad deal for almost everyone except the sellers: this is the largest leveraged buyout in history, larger than the RJR Nabisco deal that defined the term in the 1980s, and it's the second-largest acquisition in gaming behind only Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard. That's not a small transaction dressed up to sound big. It's genuinely one of the largest corporate takeovers of any kind ever completed, and it happened to a company whose products sit on more phones, consoles, and PCs on this planet than almost anything else in entertainment. That scale is exactly why I think the details matter more here than they would for a smaller studio getting acquired — when a deal this size gets financed this way, the bill eventually comes due somewhere, and I don't think it's going to land on the people who structured it.

Who really owns EA now — and who's just along for the ride

Look closely at that table and the thing that jumps out isn't the Kushner connection, even though that's the detail most headlines chased. It's how lopsided the "consortium" framing actually is. Silver Lake and Affinity Partners combined own less of EA than a single large index fund used to hold before this deal. This isn't three roughly equal partners buying a company together — it's Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund buying EA outright and bringing two much smaller American firms along, in my opinion, largely because it makes a foreign government's purchase of an iconic American entertainment company look and sound like an international partnership instead of what it actually is. I don't think that's a conspiracy theory. It's just arithmetic.

EA isn't PIF's first move into games, and it won't be its last — which is exactly why I think this deal deserves more scrutiny than a typical acquisition, not less. The fund already holds minority stakes in Nintendo, Capcom, Koei Tecmo, and Take-Two Interactive, and it runs its own gaming holding company, Savvy Games Group, which spent $6 billion earlier this year buying the mobile studio Moonton from ByteDance. Put those pieces on the same board and EA isn't just "a game publisher that got bought." It's the largest, most controlling stake PIF has ever taken in a Western entertainment company, sitting alongside a growing web of smaller positions across nearly every major publisher on the planet. Analysts have generally read PIF's interest in EA as being about the sports portfolio specifically — EA Sports FC, Madden, the kind of global, recurring-revenue franchise that fits neatly next to Saudi Arabia's other massive bets on sports as a soft-power tool. I think that reading is probably right, and I also think it's the part of this deal that should worry people more than the debt does, because debt gets restructured. Influence over the platforms hundreds of millions of people play games on doesn't get undone nearly as easily.

The debt math nobody put in the press release

Here's where I stop being diplomatic. The $55 billion price broke down into about $36 billion in cash from the consortium and roughly $20 billion in debt arranged by JPMorgan — with about $18 billion of that funded the moment the deal closed. Crucially, that debt isn't sitting with PIF, Silver Lake, or Affinity Partners. It sits on EA's own balance sheet, to be paid back out of EA's own cash flow, from bonds reportedly priced between 6.25% and 8.75% interest. The day after the deal closed, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier laid out the math that I think should have been the actual headline of this story: EA's annual EBITDA runs around $1.5 billion, and EA has told its own debt investors it plans to cut $700 million in yearly costs, including $170 million specifically labeled "organizational efficiencies." Schreier's blunt read on that filing language was that it amounts to mass layoffs. I don't think he's wrong, and I don't think it takes a finance degree to see why — you don't promise bondholders $700 million in savings by cutting the coffee budget.

Zoom out and the picture gets worse, not better. EA's own numbers for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2026 showed net revenue of $7.53 billion, up barely 1% year over year, while net income actually fell, from $1.121 billion the year before down to $887 million. That's a company whose profit was already shrinking before it took on $20 billion in new debt at rates north of 6%. Run the interest math on debt that size at those rates and you land somewhere close to, or above, that entire $1.5 billion EBITDA figure Schreier cited — meaning a meaningful chunk of everything EA earns in a given year could now be earmarked just to service what its new owners borrowed to buy it, before a single dollar goes toward making games. I don't say this to be alarmist. I say it because it's the plain arithmetic sitting in EA's own bond disclosures, and because I think "the new owners promised no immediate layoffs" — which is the line EA used in its SEC filings before the deal closed — was never really a promise about the long term. It was a promise about the first press release.

Three rounds of layoffs before the ink was even dry

This is the part of the story that I think got buried under all the geopolitics, and it shouldn't have, because it's the clearest evidence of where this is headed. EA didn't wait for the deal to close before cutting jobs — it cut staff three separate times in 2026 while the sale was still pending regulatory approval. In February and March, roughly 300 positions were eliminated across EA's Battlefield studios: DICE in Sweden, Criterion in the UK, Ripple Effect in California, and Motive in Canada. The timing is what makes it sting. Battlefield 6 had just posted the biggest launch in the franchise's history, selling around seven million copies in its first three days, going on to become the best-selling game in the United States for all of 2025 and winning Game of the Year at the UKIE Video Game Awards. EA's own spokesperson called the cuts a "realignment." I call it exactly what Schreier's math predicts happens next on a much bigger scale: a publisher trimming the people who make its best-performing product, on a schedule set by a pending sale rather than by how well that product actually did.

Then in June, a third round hit — this time recruiting, customer support, IT, and trust and safety, affecting remote workers in the U.S. and staff at EA's Hyderabad office in India, some with more than a decade at the company. None of that is development work. It's the unglamorous infrastructure that keeps a company of EA's size running day to day, and cutting it first is a pattern I've now watched play out at nearly every publisher going through a sale or a debt-driven restructuring this decade: hit the departments with the least public visibility first, save the headline-grabbing studio closures for later, and hope the story has moved on by the time anyone connects the dots. To EA's credit, it never publicly tied any of these three rounds to the pending acquisition. To my discredit toward EA, I don't believe for a second that the timing was a coincidence, and I don't think anyone reading the bond documents believes it either.

What makes this whole picture even harder to swallow is the pay gap sitting right next to it. According to EA's own amended SEC filing, CEO Andrew Wilson's total compensation for fiscal 2026 came to $38.65 million, up from $30.53 million the year before and $25.64 million the year before that — a figure the same filing puts at roughly 305 times what the median EA employee earned that year, $126,612. Wilson and other top executives also reportedly picked up more than $60 million in bonuses tied to Battlefield 6 hitting its launch milestones, in the same fiscal year EA cut jobs across the teams that built that game. I don't think a single person's pay package is inherently a scandal. I do think a company can't simultaneously plead financial caution to the people it's laying off and hand its chief executive a 27% raise in the same twelve months, and expect both of those facts to sit quietly next to each other without comment.

Congress warned about this. Nobody with the power to stop it did.

Barely two weeks after the deal was announced, Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren sent letters to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — who chairs the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the body with actual power to block the sale on national security grounds — and directly to EA's CEO. Their language wasn't hedged: they warned the transaction posed "significant foreign influence and national security risks," pointed to PIF's pattern of using strategic investments in sports and culture to shape long-term public opinion of Saudi Arabia rather than purely chasing returns, and asked pointed questions about how the personal data of EA's hundreds of millions of players would be protected once a foreign sovereign wealth fund controlled the company. Outside government, EA's own union-organized workforce and a coalition calling itself Players Alliance HQ physically protested outside the company's Redwood City headquarters in May, some dressed as Sims characters, demanding the deal be blocked over the layoff risk it represented.

None of it worked. CFIUS cleared the deal, the EU cleared it on its foreign-subsidy grounds, and the transaction closed on schedule. I don't think that outcome should surprise anyone who's watched how these reviews actually function — CFIUS blocks transactions on national security grounds far less often than senators' letters suggest it might, and a video game publisher, however culturally significant, has never been treated by U.S. regulators the way a semiconductor firm or a defense contractor would be. But I do think it's worth sitting with the fact that two sitting U.S. senators went on the record calling this an "unprecedented" foreign privatization of a major American entertainment company, and the regulatory system built specifically to catch exactly that kind of transaction looked at it and said, essentially, proceed. Whatever you think about Saudi Arabia's broader ambitions in sports and entertainment, that's a genuinely notable regulatory data point, and I don't think it's gotten nearly the attention the layoffs have.

My report card: grading the deal

I've read a lot of coverage of this sale that stops at "it closed" or "here's who owns what now." I don't think that's good enough for a deal this size, so I built my own scorecard grading it across the four things I think actually matter to the people who play EA's games and the people who make them — not the things that matter to the three firms that just bought the company.

What this actually means if you play EA's games

If you're wondering whether your next EA Sports FC or Battlefield purchase funds a foreign government, the honest answer is: less directly than headlines suggest, but not zero, either. PIF now collects the overwhelming majority of any dividend or eventual sale proceeds EA generates as a private company, though there's no evidence to date that game prices have moved specifically because of the ownership change, and I wouldn't expect that to be the first lever a new private owner pulls anyway — debt-financed buyouts usually squeeze costs internally long before they touch retail prices, because price hikes are visible and cost cuts to a customer-support team in another country are not. What I'd actually watch for, as someone who's read a few too many private-equity playbooks at this point, is subtler: slower patch cycles, thinner customer support, more aggressive in-game monetization dressed up as "player choice," and quieter cancellations of anything mid-budget and single-player that doesn't fit a live-service, recurring-revenue model. Nothing about that requires a press release. It just requires time, and this deal just bought its new owners plenty of it.

I'd also gently push back on the panic I've seen in some corners of the internet treating this as EA suddenly becoming "a Saudi company" that will start inserting propaganda into Madden. I don't think that's how soft power actually works, and I think it distracts from the more boring, more certain risk sitting in the bond documents. The realistic danger here isn't ideological. It's financial engineering doing what financial engineering reliably does: extracting value from a company's future cash flow to pay for the transaction that changed its ownership, and passing the resulting pressure down onto the people who actually build the product. That's a less dramatic story than "Saudi Arabia buys EA," but it's the one the numbers actually support, and I think it deserves at least as much attention as the geopolitics did.

What we still don't know

To be fair to EA, a lot of the worst-case version of this story hasn't happened yet, and I want to be honest about the gap between "the math points this direction" and "it's already occurred." No post-closing layoff round tied explicitly to the new ownership has been publicly announced as of this writing — what exists right now is Schreier's cost-cutting math, EA's own bondholder disclosures, and a pattern of three pre-close layoff rounds, not a confirmed fourth one under the new owners. EA has also not raised prices, cancelled any announced game, or made any public statement suggesting editorial control has shifted. Whether the promised $700 million in "organizational efficiencies" gets found through attrition, automation, studio consolidation, or straightforward layoffs is genuinely still an open question, and anyone telling you they know the exact shape of it with certainty is guessing, same as I am. What isn't a guess is the math itself — the debt, the interest rate, the EBITDA gap, the layoff history. I'd rather be the outlet that told you clearly what's already documented and admitted what isn't, than the one that either downplays a $20 billion debt load or predicts a specific catastrophe that hasn't happened yet.