Analysis
Electronic Arts is now a private company, and the deal that got it there is the largest leveraged buyout in corporate history. A consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, alongside private equity firm Silver Lake and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, completed its $55 billion acquisition this week, paying EA shareholders $210 per share in cash and pulling the gaming giant off the Nasdaq for good.
How the Deal Came Together
The deal has been in motion far longer than its closing date suggests. Bloomberg reported that Kushner's Affinity Partners held secret talks with Saudi officials roughly a year before the transaction closed, quietly assembling the financing and political relationships that turned an ambitious take-private idea into the largest buyout ever completed. PIF secured a $20 billion loan from JPMorgan to help fund the deal, with the bank also serving as lead advisor -- a debt package large enough on its own to rank among the biggest acquisition financings ever arranged.
“## How the Deal Came Together The deal has been in motion far longer than its closing date suggests.”
EA joins a growing list of marquee US assets where PIF has taken a direct or indirect stake, including large positions in Uber and a majority stake in EV maker Lucid, which this same week announced its own operational turnaround plan. The pattern is unmistakable: Saudi sovereign capital is no longer content to be a passive LP writing checks into US venture and buyout funds -- it's increasingly the lead investor structuring and controlling the deal itself.
A Record-Setting Buyout
Historically, this tops even the marquee leveraged buyouts that defined earlier eras of private equity -- RJR Nabisco's $31 billion 1988 deal and TXU's $45 billion 2007 buyout both defined their decades as the largest LBOs done to that point, and EA's $55 billion transaction now exceeds both in nominal terms, even before adjusting for the scale of debt markets that made it possible.
For founders and GPs, the EA deal is a data point in a broader story: sovereign wealth funds are increasingly comfortable leading control transactions in US technology and media companies rather than taking minority stakes alongside a traditional buyout shop. That shift changes who founders and later-stage companies are ultimately negotiating with when a strategic sale or take-private becomes the exit path, and it raises the stakes on political and regulatory scrutiny of foreign-led deals in sensitive sectors.
The Risks Ahead
The bear case here is straightforward. A $55 billion purchase price backed by a $20 billion loan means EA now carries meaningfully more leverage than it did as a public company, and debt-funded buyouts historically push management toward cutting costs and protecting the safest, most reliably profitable franchises rather than funding the next big creative swing. Kushner's direct role, given his family's ties to the current administration, also guarantees a level of political scrutiny that most PE-led buyouts never have to navigate.
What to watch: whether EA's near-term product slate visibly narrows toward its safest franchises as the new ownership works to service $20 billion of acquisition debt, and whether this deal accelerates similar sovereign-capital-led take-private bids for other large, publicly traded US tech and media companies still trading below their private-market highs.
