Saudi Arabia’s $55 billion takeover of Electronic Arts will happen next week
Bad news for anyone holding out hope that some power-on-high would swoop in and put a halt to Saudi Arabia’s takeover of Electronic Arts: A new Form 8-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission says the deal has green lights across the board, and will be done next week.
More formally, “as of July 30, 2026, all regulatory approvals required to complete the Merger have been obtained,” the filing states. “Electronic Arts currently expects the Merger to close on or about the close of trading on August 4, 2026. Completion of the Merger remains subject to the satisfaction or waiver of the remaining customary closing conditions set forth in the Merger Agreement.”
Realistically, I don’t think anyone expected that this proposed takeover by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund would run into too many obstacles. The Federal Trade Commission fought like hell when Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard, and ultimately lost; the PIF takeover of EA seems far less likely to trigger concerns about competition, because it’s not a merger of two game makers into one bigger game maker, but rather a change in ownership.
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Which isn’t to say it’s without risk. The acquisition will take EA private, leaving it—within regulatory limits—subject to the whims of its new owner. In this case, that’s effectively Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, chair of the Public Investment Fund, and credibly accused mastermind of the 2018 murder of journalist and Saudi regime critic Jamal Khashoggi.
The impact of that change is already being felt. Some of the biggest Sims 4 content creators quit EA’s creator network in 2025 over the buyout; one, Lilsimsie, wrote that “the values represented by the people acquiring EA are fundamentally at odds with what I stand for and support,” presumably a reference to the Saudi kingdom’s ongoing repression of women and the LGBTQ+ community. Former BioWare lead writer Trick Weekes expressed similar concerns, predicting that “guns and football” games will be fine, but that “gay stuff” and “politics [they’re] not going to like” are going to fall by the wayside.
Apart from that, the deal presents no small amount of risk to EA itself. The $55 billion deal is the largest leveraged buyout in history, and financing it will leave EA saddled with $20 billion in debt. That’s a huge burden it will have to pay off. In similar situations, we’ve seen companies aggressively cut costs, paring themselves to the bone and casting aside anything but the most proven moneymakers. In EA’s case, those moneymakers would be Battlefield and EA FC—the “guns and football” invoked by Weekes.
A serious challenge to the takeover was never in the cards. One of the minority backers of the takeover is Affinity Partners, an investment company owned by Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US president Donald Trump, and Trump is also tight with bin Salman. The current chair of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, is also a very vocal Trump supporter.
