EA's $55 Billion Buyout Just Closed. It's the Biggest LBO Ever

Electronic Arts is no longer a public company. The $55 billion acquisition by a consortium of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners officially closed on August 4, 2026, according to EA's own announcement. Shareholders got $210 in cash per share, a 25% premium over EA's unaffected price of $168.32. Per S&P Global, it's now the largest leveraged buyout ever completed, edging out the $32 billion TXU Energy deal that held the record since 2007.

How the deal actually got funded

The math behind a $55 billion take-private is worth sitting with. Roughly $36 billion came from equity, split between the three buyers plus PIF rolling over the roughly 9.9% stake it already held in EA. The other $20 billion is debt, with about $18 billion of it funded at close, all of it committed by JPMorgan Chase. Ownership now breaks down as PIF at 93.4%, Silver Lake at 5.5%, and Affinity Partners at 1.1%, according to post-close reporting.

The shareholder vote wasn't close. More than 201 million votes went in favor versus roughly 1.9 million against back in December 2025. Regulatory approval took longer, clearing CFIUS, U.S. antitrust review, and the EU's antitrust and Foreign Subsidies Regulation reviews before the final green light came on July 30, 2026.

What actually changes day to day

Less than people assume, at least on paper. Andrew Wilson stays on as CEO, and EA keeps its Redwood City headquarters. Silver Lake's Egon Durban called EA "a global leader in interactive entertainment, anchored by premier sports franchises, with accelerating revenue growth" when the deal was first announced, which is the kind of thing you say about a company you don't plan to gut immediately.

But going private erases the quarterly earnings calls that used to force EA to justify its FIFA, err, EA Sports FC and Battlefield spending in public. That's the real shift. A private EA carrying $20 billion in new debt has to generate enough cash to service that debt, and it no longer has to explain its cost-cutting or franchise bets to public shareholders every quarter. It answers to three owners with very long investment horizons and a debt schedule instead.

The layoffs context nobody should ignore

This deal isn't closing into a healthy labor market for game developers. Independent layoff trackers put 2026's confirmed industry job cuts at over 10,000 by mid-August, on pace to approach the roughly 15,600 cut in 2024's worst year, even as the industry posted around $195.6 billion in global game sales in 2025. Profits and layoffs have been rising together across the sector for two straight years now. A newly private EA carrying a heavy debt load sits squarely inside that pattern, not outside it.

The verdict

Call this what it is: a leveraged bet that EA Sports FC, Madden, and Battlefield generate reliable enough cash flow to carry $20 billion in debt for years. Nothing about going private makes a game studio's next release better or worse on its own. What it does is remove public scrutiny at exactly the moment the industry is cutting jobs at a record pace and calling it business as usual. Watch EA's next few rounds of studio decisions more than its next few game launches. That's where a debt-funded ownership structure actually shows up.