EA's 55 Billion Dollar Buyout Has Cleared Every Regulator, and the Company Goes Private on August 4

We have known this was coming since September 2025, but there is something strange about watching it actually happen. Electronic Arts, the company behind FC, Madden, Battlefield, The Sims and Apex Legends, told the SEC on July 30 that "all regulatory approvals required to complete the Merger have been obtained." The last obstacle is gone. The 55 billion dollar buyout is expected to close on or about the close of trading on August 4, and when it does, EA stops being a publicly traded company for the first time since its IPO in 1990.

It is the largest leveraged buyout in history, and the ownership split is heavily one-sided. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund ends up with 93.4 percent of the company. Silver Lake, the private equity firm, takes 5.5 percent, and Affinity Partners takes the remaining 1.1 percent. Andrew Wilson, who has run EA since 2013, stays on as CEO.

What actually changes on August 4

For anyone playing an EA game this week, the honest answer is: nothing visible. FC servers stay up, Madden ships this month as planned, and the EA Sports FC 27 reveal with Mbappe on the cover rolls on as if nothing happened. Going private is mostly paperwork on day one. EA's shares get bought out, the stock disappears from the NASDAQ after 36 years, and quarterly earnings calls stop being public events.

The longer term is where the real questions live. Private companies do not have to explain themselves to shareholders every three months, which cuts both ways. It can mean more patience for projects that need time, the kind of runway that a live game like Battlefield 6 benefits from. It can also mean cost cutting behind closed doors, because leveraged buyouts of this size come with enormous debt, and that debt has to be serviced by the company that was bought. EA's new owners will want their money back eventually.

Our take

We are not going to pretend we know how this ends, because nobody does, including the people signing the papers. What we can say is that the era of EA as a public company, the one that gamers have complained about, memed about and bought games from for three and a half decades, closes on Tuesday. The PIF has been buying into gaming aggressively for years, but owning 93.4 percent of one of the biggest publishers on the planet is a different scale of involvement entirely. Keep an eye on what happens to the sports titles, since annual franchises like FC, Madden and College Football are the steady revenue that makes a deal like this bankable. If the new EA starts making decisions that feel unusual for the old EA, that will not be a coincidence.