Electronic Arts is about to stop being a public company after 36 years, and it’s happening faster than almost anyone expected just a month ago. As of July 30, 2026, EA confirmed in an SEC filing that every single regulatory approval needed to close its $55 billion take-private buyout has been secured. The merger is now expected to close on or about the close of trading on August 4, 2026.

That’s a big deal, literally. This is the largest leveraged buyout in corporate history, surpassing the $45 billion TXU Energy deal that had held the record since 2007. I’ve been following this story since it first leaked back in September 2025, and honestly, the pace of the last two weeks caught me off guard.

From $50 billion rumor to $55 billion reality

When talks first surfaced, early reports pointed to a roughly $50 billion offer. By the time Electronic Arts formally announced the agreement on September 29, 2025, the number had grown to approximately $55 billion in enterprise value, with EA shareholders set to receive $210 per share in cash. That price represented a roughly 25% premium over EA’s unaffected closing price of $168.32 from September 25, 2025, the last trading day before news of the deal broke.

The buyer group is a three-way consortium: Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), private equity giant Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners, the investment firm founded by Jared Kushner. PIF isn’t a new face here either. It already held roughly a 9.9% to 10% stake in EA before the deal, and instead of cashing that out, it’s rolling it into the new private structure. When the deal closes, PIF is expected to hold approximately 93.4% of the newly private EA, a massive jump from its prior minority position.

Here’s what’s interesting about how this thing is funded. The consortium is putting up around $36 billion in equity, with the rest, about $20 billion, coming from debt financing arranged entirely by JPMorgan Chase. That’s an unusually concentrated commitment for a deal this size. Roughly $18 billion of that debt is expected to be funded right at close, which means EA walks into private ownership carrying a heavy leverage load, something close to 6x gross leverage according to credit analysts who’ve been tracking the transaction.

Why it took so much longer than planned

EA shareholders approved the take-private at a virtual meeting on December 22, 2025, with roughly 99% of votes cast in favor. At that point, the deal was targeting a close sometime in the first quarter of EA’s 2027 fiscal year, which runs roughly April through June 2026. That window came and went.

The holdup wasn’t antitrust in the traditional sense. Because PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners don’t own competing game publishers or hardware platforms, the deal never faced the kind of horizontal market concentration questions that dogged Microsoft’s $75 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition. Instead, the real friction came from CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which reviews deals involving foreign, state-linked capital.

Sources close to the process suggest the national security review of a Saudi sovereign wealth fund taking a 93% stake in a major American entertainment company was always going to draw more scrutiny than a typical antitrust filing.

The outside date on the merger agreement had to be pushed from its original June 30, 2026 deadline out to September 28, 2026, just to give CFIUS room to finish its work. The European Commission cleared the deal under EU merger rules on July 23, 2026, and that appears to have been the last major domino. I didn’t expect the CFIUS piece to resolve itself so quickly once the EU signed off, and that’s exactly why the sudden August 4 closing date feels like such a fast turn.

The layoffs nobody wanted to talk about

What most articles missed while covering the regulatory drama is what’s already been happening inside EA’s studios. Even before the ink dried, layoffs hit Battlefield Studios, the umbrella covering Criterion, DICE, Ripple Effect, and Motive. That’s notable because it came just months after Battlefield 6 launched as 2025’s best-selling game in the United States. Watching a studio get trimmed right after its biggest commercial win in years is the kind of contradiction that tends to get buried under bigger headlines.

Industry insiders hint that this won’t be the last round. EA’s own SEC filings acknowledge the risk of voluntary staff departures tied to concerns over the human rights record of one of its new owners, with particular exposure at studios like BioWare and Maxis, both known for narrative-driven, socially conscious storytelling. Analysts also point out that EA pulls more than half its revenue from just four franchises, EA Sports FC, Madden NFL, Battlefield, and The Sims, which creates real concentration risk against a debt pile this large.

Not everyone is thrilled

This is one of those things I genuinely got excited about following, but it’s impossible to ignore how controversial it’s been. Petitions circulated trying to block the acquisition outright, largely over worries that private, debt-laden ownership under a state-linked fund and a politically connected firm like Affinity Partners will accelerate monetization across EA’s biggest franchises.

Reddit threads reacting to the original announcement were blunt, with users pointing to Kushner’s ties to the Trump administration and PIF’s government backing as reasons to be skeptical that “going private” would actually mean less corporate pressure, not more.

Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, raised concerns during the review process, and a union representing EA workers criticized the structure as prioritizing investor returns over employees. In my opinion, the skepticism is fair. A company doesn’t take on $20 billion in new debt without eventually needing to service it, and that pressure typically lands somewhere.

What comes next

Once the merger closes, EA will be delisted from the Nasdaq, ending 36 years as a publicly traded company. Andrew Wilson stays on as CEO, and EA remains headquartered in Redwood City, California. According to reports, the consortium’s stated plan is to let EA build long term without the quarterly earnings pressure that comes with being public, with PIF’s sports and esports portfolio, which includes stakes in LIV Golf and Newcastle United FC, potentially opening new cross-promotional avenues for EA Sports FC.

If the current trajectory holds, the EA buyout closing on August 4, 2026, sets a new benchmark for how far private capital, sovereign wealth funds included, is willing to go to own a piece of the entertainment industry. Whether that ownership structure ends up serving players and developers or mainly serving the balance sheet is the question that’s going to define EA’s next several years far more than any single game launch.