Analysis
A consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, private equity firm Silver Lake and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners completed its acquisition of Electronic Arts on Wednesday, closing what is now the largest leveraged buyout in history. EA shareholders received $210 in cash per share, the company's stock stopped trading, and it was delisted from the Nasdaq after more than three decades as a public company.
The roughly $55 billion price tag surpasses the 2007 buyout of Texas utility TXU, long the reference point for the largest LBO ever attempted, and it does so in a sector -- video games -- that private equity has circled for years without ever landing a target this large. EA owns FIFA (now EA Sports FC), Madden NFL, Battlefield, Apex Legends and The Sims, a franchise portfolio with billions of players and some of the most durable recurring revenue in entertainment.
Kushner's role is the part of this deal that will get the most scrutiny. Bloomberg reported that his Affinity Partners held secret talks with Saudi officials that helped pave the way for the transaction as far back as September 2025, and Kushner is described as a central figure in the negotiations that dragged on for nearly a year before closing. Affinity, the Miami-based firm Kushner founded after leaving the White House, has raised billions largely from Gulf sovereign wealth funds since 2021 -- this deal is by far its highest-profile use of that capital.
“Kushner's role is the part of this deal that will get the most scrutiny.”
The comparison set for a deal this size is thin. Take-privates of public tech and media companies at anywhere near $50 billion are exceptionally rare -- Dell's $67 billion buyout in 2013 and the aforementioned TXU deal are essentially the only prior comps of this scale, and neither involved a foreign sovereign fund as the controlling buyer of a major American entertainment company. PIF has been building a gaming portfolio for years, including large stakes in Nintendo, Take-Two and Activision Blizzard before its 2023 sale to Microsoft, but full ownership of a studio this size is a different order of control entirely.
For the buyout and gaming industries, this closes the loop on a deal that reshapes how big private equity checks can get in tech. It also raises the leverage question directly: a $55 billion LBO requires enormous debt financing, and EA's ability to service that load while continuing to fund AAA game development and live-service titles is now the central question for the next several years, not whether the deal would close.
The politics are unavoidable. A sitting president's son-in-law brokering and profiting from a Saudi sovereign fund's acquisition of a major American entertainment company, completed while Kushner's father-in-law is in office, is the kind of conflict-of-interest story that outlasts the deal-close headline. CEPR and other critics have already characterized the arrangement as extraction rather than investment; expect continued congressional and media attention regardless of how EA performs under its new owners.
For founders and operators, the deal is a data point on how much dry powder sovereign capital is willing to deploy into a single, control-taking bet on Western consumer tech and media, at a moment when most growth-stage venture capital is chasing AI infrastructure instead. It's also a reminder that PIF's gaming ambitions, first signaled by its Savvy Games Group vehicle years ago, were never just about minority stakes.
What to watch: how EA's next slate of games -- and its live-service monetization strategy in particular -- shifts under private ownership and a heavier debt load, and whether this closing emboldens PIF or other sovereign funds to pursue additional take-private bids for other large, cash-generative public tech and media names.
