Electronic Arts is about to stop being a public company. In an SEC filing dated July 30, 2026, EA confirmed that every regulatory approval needed to complete its $55 billion take-private sale has been obtained, and that the deal is expected to close “on or about the close of trading” on August 4, 2026, as Engadget also confirmed. When it does, EA goes private under a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), ending a run on the Nasdaq that started with the company’s 1989 stock market debut and cementing what Wikipedia’s tracker on the proposed leveraged buyout of Electronic Arts confirms is the largest leveraged buyout in history.

The closing caps ten months of shareholder votes, antitrust reviews, a missed deadline, and a national-security review that outlasted every other regulatory checkpoint combined. It also closes the loop on two stories this site has already covered in detail: the deal’s stall at the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and the European Commission’s antitrust clearance. This is the actual ending – the moment EA’s stock stops trading and Andrew Wilson starts answering to three private owners instead of public shareholders.

EA’s $55 Billion Buyout Clears Its Final Hurdle

The deal’s last real obstacle was CFIUS, the interagency panel that screens foreign investment for national-security risk. Because PIF is a sovereign wealth fund and EA holds player data across hundreds of millions of accounts, the review ran far longer than the deal’s antitrust checks. EA’s own June 30, 2026 outside date came and went with CFIUS still undecided, forcing an extension to September 28, 2026, a timeline Tech Times tracked in detail throughout July. According to Yahoo Finance’s review of the SEC filing, EA stated plainly that “all regulatory approvals required to complete the Merger have been obtained” as of July 30 – the language that finally unlocked an August 4 closing date, more than a month later than originally planned.

The European side of the review finished first. The European Commission cleared the deal on antitrust grounds on July 23, 2026, concluding that PIF’s role as a financial investor – rather than a rival publisher – posed limited competitive risk. A second, newer test followed one week later: the EU’s Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR), a regime designed to catch state-backed buyers using non-EU subsidies to outbid private rivals. TalkEsport reported that the FSR review cleared without imposing visible remedies – a notable result given this was one of the first major gaming deals tested under the newer rule.

Inside the Deal: Who Owns EA Now

Once the deal closes, EA’s ownership consolidates into three parties, with PIF holding an overwhelming majority. PIF rolls its existing 9.9% EA stake into a much larger post-close position, while Silver Lake and Affinity Partners – the investment firm led by Jared Kushner – take smaller slices. Shacknews confirmed the same ownership structure directly from the merger filing language.

InvestorPost-Close StakeRole
Public Investment Fund (PIF)93.4%Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund; majority owner
Silver Lake5.5%Private equity firm; longtime technology and gaming investor
Affinity Partners1.1%Investment firm led by Jared Kushner

The Financing Stack

The $55 billion enterprise value breaks down into roughly $52.5 billion of equity value at $210 a share, plus assumed debt. The consortium is funding the purchase with about $36 billion in equity and $20 billion in debt fully committed by JPMorgan Chase Bank, with an estimated $18 billion of that debt actually drawn at closing. That debt load – layered onto a company that had $2.2 billion in debt before the deal – is the single biggest financial risk analysts flag for EA’s future as a private company, since interest payments now have to be serviced out of game revenue rather than spread across a public balance sheet with equity markets as a backstop.

How EA Got Here: A Timeline of the Largest LBO in History

The deal moved through more checkpoints than almost any gaming acquisition on record. It needed a shareholder vote, a U.S. antitrust clearance, a separate CFIUS national-security review, and two distinct European Union reviews – antitrust and, for the first time on a deal this size, the Foreign Subsidies Regulation.

DateMilestone
Sept 29, 2025Deal announced: $55B enterprise value, $210 per share
Dec 22, 2025EA shareholders approve the transaction
June 30, 2026Original outside date passes; deal still pending CFIUS review
July 23, 2026European Commission clears the deal on antitrust grounds
July 30, 2026EU Foreign Subsidies Regulation review clears; SEC filing confirms all approvals obtained
Aug 4, 2026Deal expected to close; EA delists and becomes privately held

The September 28, 2026 contractual outside date – the drop-dead deadline both sides had negotiated in case regulators dragged their feet – will simply never come into play now that CFIUS has cleared the deal weeks ahead of schedule.

The Price Tag: $55 Billion, $210 a Share, and a Deal the Market Already Priced In

EA shares closed at an all-time high of $209.59 on July 30, 2026 – a few cents under the $210 deal price and a sign that Wall Street had almost fully stopped pricing in any risk of the deal collapsing. That’s a sharp contrast to earlier in the review, when EA’s stock traded several dollars below the offer price to reflect real uncertainty about whether CFIUS would demand concessions or block the deal outright. With the spread nearly closed heading into the final week, EA’s roughly $52.6 billion market capitalization was, for all practical purposes, already trading as if the deal were done.

At $210 a share, the transaction represents a 25% premium over EA’s unaffected pre-deal share price. It’s also, on an enterprise-value basis, the largest leveraged buyout ever completed – bigger than the 2007 buyout of Texas utility TXU Energy Future Holdings, which held the record for nearly two decades.

Why Now: Battlefield 6 and a Record Fiscal Year Made This Deal Possible

One detail cuts against the narrative that EA needed rescuing: the company just posted its best fiscal year on record. EA’s fiscal 2026 results, reported in May, showed record net bookings of $8.026 billion, up 9% year over year, and operating cash flow of $2.553 billion, up 23%. Game Developer’s earnings coverage credited Battlefield 6 – which launched in October 2025 and became the best-selling shooter of the year – alongside continued growth in EA Sports FC 26 and Apex Legends, which posted its strongest quarterly bookings of the fiscal year in Q4.

That performance matters for how the deal gets read. This isn’t a distressed-asset sale; it’s a financially healthy, growing publisher being taken private at a 25% premium by investors betting they can extract more value outside the scrutiny of quarterly public earnings than EA could generate as a public company. It also explains why the buyers were willing to take on $20 billion in debt: a business throwing off record cash flow can service debt that would sink a weaker one.

What Changes (and What Doesn’t) for Gamers

In the short term, remarkably little changes on the surface. Andrew Wilson remains CEO, EA’s headquarters stay in Redwood City, California, and every major franchise – EA Sports FC, Madden NFL, Battlefield, Apex Legends, The Sims, and EA’s Star Wars titles – continues under the same corporate parent. There’s no announced change to live-service roadmaps, no studio closures tied directly to the closing itself, and no immediate pricing change flagged in any regulatory filing.

What does change is transparency. Once EA goes private and delists, it stops filing quarterly 10-Qs and annual 10-Ks, stops holding public earnings calls, and stops disclosing the kind of granular bookings-by-franchise data that let outside analysts (and journalists) track EA’s health in near real time. Layoffs, studio reassignments, and project cancellations – the sort of thing that shows up in a public company’s disclosures or gets asked about on an earnings call – become far harder to track independently once EA answers only to three private owners instead of public markets.

Andrew Wilson’s Payday: $38.6 Million Salary, Up to $125 Million If Pushed Out

Wilson’s compensation has become one of the deal’s more contentious side stories. EA’s own disclosures show Wilson earned $38.6 million in fiscal 2026 – about 305 times the company’s median employee pay, according to GamesRadar+’s analysis of EA’s compensation filings, which noted the total included an $8 million year-over-year bonus increase. That figure landed awkwardly against a fiscal year that also saw layoffs among the Battlefield 6 development team, even as the game became the franchise’s best-performing launch.

The going-private deal adds a second number to the controversy. If Wilson is terminated without cause within 18 months of closing, he’s entitled to a package GamesRadar+ and Yahoo Finance both put at more than $125 million – a $9.1 million cash severance payment plus a bonus and full vesting of his outstanding EA stock. It’s a standard change-in-control structure for a deal this size, but the timing, right alongside real layoffs and a fresh $20 billion debt load, has made it a lightning rod for critics of the deal.

The BioWare Warning Sign: What Private Ownership Could Mean for EA’s Studios

If there’s a preview of how debt pressure could reshape EA’s internal priorities, it’s already playing out at BioWare. As this site reported in July, the Dragon Age and Mass Effect studio has shrunk to fewer than 100 employees, down from more than 400 at its peak, following Anthem’s shutdown and Dragon Age: The Veilguard selling roughly 50% below EA’s internal expectations. Former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah has publicly floated the idea that EA’s post-buyout debt load makes selling off dormant studios or IP more financially attractive than shutting them down outright.

Nothing in EA’s closing disclosures names BioWare or any other studio specifically. But the mechanism Darrah described – a private company under debt pressure making faster, less publicly visible calls about which studios survive – is exactly the dynamic that becomes easier for EA’s new owners once quarterly earnings calls and public shareholder pressure disappear from the equation.

EA vs. the Competition: Take-Two, Ubisoft, and Activision Blizzard

EA’s move away from public markets stands out because most of its direct competitors are heading the opposite direction, or are already owned by a strategic parent rather than financial sponsors. Take-Two Interactive remains public on Nasdaq and is preparing for Grand Theft Auto VI’s console launch. Activision Blizzard is no longer independent at all – Microsoft acquired it outright for $68.7 billion in 2023, a strategic acquisition rather than a leveraged buyout, meaning Activision Blizzard answers to Microsoft’s public shareholders rather than a private consortium. Ubisoft, meanwhile, is public but deeply distressed: the publisher’s stock has fallen roughly 93% over seven years, with Tencent now holding a 26.32% stake and no buyout on the table.

That makes EA’s going-private deal structurally closer to Dell’s 2013 buyout than to anything else in gaming: a large, profitable, publicly traded company voluntarily exiting public markets under a leveraged deal, rather than being folded into a bigger strategic acquirer or limping along as a distressed public stock. It’s also a sharp contrast with Discord, which has spent 2026 trying to go the other direction – toward a public listing – and has stalled well below the valuation Microsoft once offered to acquire it outright.

The Largest LBO in History: How EA Stacks Up Against Wall Street’s Biggest Buyouts

At $55 billion, EA’s buyout surpasses every leveraged buyout on record, including deals that once looked untouchable. The comparison isn’t purely academic – several of history’s biggest LBOs ended in bankruptcy or a rocky return to public markets, which is exactly the risk analysts are now weighing for EA given its new $20 billion debt load.

DealValueYearOutcome
Electronic Arts (PIF / Silver Lake / Affinity Partners)$55B2026Largest LBO ever; closing Aug. 4, 2026
TXU / Energy Future Holdings (KKR / TPG / Goldman Sachs)$45B2007Bankrupt in 2014
HCA Healthcare (Bain Capital / KKR)$33B2006Returned to public markets in 2011
RJR Nabisco (KKR)$31B1988Subject of “Barbarians at the Gate”
Dell (Michael Dell / Silver Lake)$24.4B2013Returned to public markets in 2018
Hilton Hotels (Blackstone)$14B2007Most profitable private-equity deal on record

Notably, Microsoft’s $68.7 billion Activision Blizzard purchase is larger in dollar terms but doesn’t belong on this list – it was a strategic acquisition by an operating company, not a financial sponsor-led leveraged buyout, which is the specific category EA’s deal now leads.

PIF’s Broader Gaming Empire

EA is now the largest single holding in a gaming portfolio PIF has been assembling for years through Savvy Games Group, its dedicated gaming and esports investment arm, which has allocated roughly $38 billion since 2022. Savvy owns ESL FACEIT Group, the world’s largest esports organizer, and Scopely, acquired for $4.9 billion in 2023. PIF also holds minority stakes directly in Nintendo (around 5%), Capcom (around 5%), and other publishers, and separately funds the Esports World Cup. Notably, EA’s stake stays held directly by PIF rather than being folded into Savvy – a structural signal that PIF treats EA as a strategic holding in its own right, not just another portfolio line item.

The Sportswashing and National-Security Debate Isn’t Over

Regulatory approval doesn’t end the criticism that’s followed this deal since it was announced. U.S. senators raised objections during the review process over a foreign sovereign fund gaining majority control of a company holding data on hundreds of millions of players, which is precisely what pushed the CFIUS review to run longer than every other regulatory check combined. Labor and human-rights advocates have separately criticized the deal as part of a broader pattern of Saudi Arabia using PIF’s gaming investments – including its funding of the Esports World Cup – to improve its international image, a practice critics label sportswashing.

None of that criticism blocked the deal, and CFIUS clearing it without a public mitigation announcement suggests regulators were satisfied with whatever data-handling or governance commitments were made behind closed doors. But the debate is a template other sovereign-fund gaming deals will now have to navigate, and it’s likely to resurface any time EA makes a major content, moderation, or data-policy decision under its new ownership.

What Happens Next: 5 Predictions for EA’s Private Future

  • Debt service becomes the dominant financial pressure. With roughly $18 billion of the $20 billion debt commitment expected to be drawn at closing, servicing that load will likely shape decisions about live-service monetization in EA Sports FC and Apex Legends more directly than public shareholders ever did.
  • Studio consolidation continues quietly. BioWare’s collapse to under 100 staff may be the first of several similar stories; without quarterly earnings calls forcing disclosure, further studio downsizing could happen with far less public visibility.
  • Dormant IP gets sold or revived. Mark Darrah’s theory – that EA holds “a huge repository of dormant IPs” worth more sold off than shelved – becomes more plausible under a private owner focused on paying down debt rather than protecting a public stock price.
  • Transparency drops sharply. Expect far less granular data on franchise performance, layoffs, and cancellations going forward, since EA will no longer be legally required to disclose it the way a public company must.
  • This becomes the template deal other sovereign-fund gaming bids get measured against. The CFIUS review’s length, and the specific data-governance concessions likely made to clear it, will shape how future foreign-backed gaming acquisitions get structured and reviewed.

For illustration, here’s how the deal’s core terms compile into a single snapshot:

// Editorial summary compiled from SEC filing coverage – not an official data feed
{
  "deal_value_usd": "55B",
  "price_per_share_usd": 210,
  "premium_over_unaffected_price": "25%",
  "announced": "2025-09-29",
  "shareholder_vote": "2025-12-22",
  "expected_close": "2026-08-04",
  "ownership_post_close": {
    "PIF": "93.4%",
    "Silver_Lake": "5.5%",
    "Affinity_Partners": "1.1%"
  },
  "financing": {
    "equity_usd": "36B",
    "debt_committed_usd": "20B",
    "debt_expected_at_close_usd": "18B",
    "lead_bank": "JPMorgan Chase"
  },
  "ceo_post_close": "Andrew Wilson",
  "hq_post_close": "Redwood City, CA"
}

Frequently Asked Questions

When does EA officially go private?
EA expects the deal to close on or about the close of trading on August 4, 2026, according to its July 30 SEC filing confirming all regulatory approvals were obtained.

Who owns EA after the buyout closes?
A consortium made up of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (93.4%), Silver Lake (5.5%), and Affinity Partners (1.1%), the investment firm led by Jared Kushner.

Will Andrew Wilson still be CEO after EA goes private?
Yes. Wilson remains CEO, and EA’s headquarters stay in Redwood City, California, according to the company’s own closing disclosures.

Does EA stock still trade after the deal closes?
No. Once the merger closes, EA delists from Nasdaq and stops trading publicly; shareholders are cashed out at $210 per share.

What happens to EA’s games and franchises?
Nothing has been announced that changes ownership of EA Sports FC, Madden NFL, Battlefield, Apex Legends, The Sims, or EA’s Star Wars titles – all continue under EA as a newly private company.

Why did the deal take almost a year to close?
It needed a shareholder vote, U.S. antitrust clearance, a CFIUS national-security review, and two separate EU reviews (antitrust and the Foreign Subsidies Regulation). The CFIUS review ran longest, pushing the close past the original June 30, 2026 deadline.

Is this really the largest leveraged buyout in history?
Yes, on an enterprise-value basis. At $55 billion, it surpasses the 2007 buyout of TXU Energy Future Holdings ($45 billion), which had held the record for nearly two decades.

Could EA go public again in the future?
It’s possible but not announced. Other major LBO targets – including Dell and HCA Healthcare – eventually returned to public markets years after going private, though EA’s new owners have made no statement about a future re-listing.