Who owns EA? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Electronic Arts spent 37 years as one of the most scrutinized public companies in entertainment. Every quarter it reported how many people bought Madden, how much they spent inside Ultimate Team, and whether the next Battlefield was on schedule. That scrutiny ended on August 4, 2026. EA is now a private company owned largely by a foreign government.

The buyer is the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, joined by the technology investor Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, the firm founded by Jared Kushner. They paid $210 a share in cash, valuing EA at roughly $55 billion. About $20 billion of that came from borrowed money committed by a single bank, which makes this the largest leveraged buyout ever completed, ahead of the $32 billion TXU deal that had held the record since 2007.

Understanding who owns EA matters because the ownership change alters three things at once. It puts a state investor in control of Madden, The Sims, Battlefield, and EA Sports FC. It replaces public shareholders with a sponsor group that answers to nobody outside itself. And it loads roughly $18 billion of debt onto a company that carried about $2.2 billion before. This article traces how EA got here, who holds what, and what the structure means for the people who make and play its games.

Electronic Arts was founded on May 27, 1982, in San Mateo, California, by Trip Hawkins, who had run marketing at Apple and left to start a company built around the idea that game developers should be treated and credited like recording artists. Early EA boxes were designed like album sleeves and listed the programmers by name. Hawkins put in a reported $200,000 of his own money and raised venture capital shortly after, with Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins among the early backers.

The company is headquartered in Redwood City, California, and employed roughly 14,500 people as of 2025 before the most recent rounds of cuts. Its business is publishing and operating games across console, PC, and mobile, and it has been reshaped over the past decade around live services rather than one-off sales. Ultimate Team, the card-collecting mode inside its football and American football games, is the single most important revenue engine in the company.

The franchise list is the asset that made EA worth $55 billion: EA Sports FC, formerly FIFA, Madden NFL, The Sims, Battlefield, Apex Legends, Need for Speed, Dragon Age, and the sports licences underneath them. Those licences are contracts rather than property. EA rents the NFL and the Premier League. It owns The Sims.

In its fiscal year ended March 31, 2026, EA reported net revenue of $7.53 billion, up 1%, and record net bookings of $8.03 billion, up 9%. Live services and other net bookings were $5.63 billion of that total, up $292 million or 5% year over year. The growth came mainly from the launch of Battlefield 6 alongside the global football and American football franchises. Those are the last audited full-year figures EA is likely to publish.

EA is no longer publicly traded. Its common stock ceased trading and was delisted from the Nasdaq when the merger closed on August 4, 2026. There is no EA ticker to buy, no quarterly earnings call, and no proxy statement. The company is owned outright by a three-party consortium and continues to operate from Redwood City under the Electronic Arts name.

Control sits with the Public Investment Fund. PIF is the sovereign wealth fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and it is the anchor of the country's Vision 2030 program to move the economy away from oil. Gaming is one of the sectors that program singled out, which is why PIF was already an EA shareholder before it bid for the whole company.

The three buyers are not equal partners despite being presented together. According to a Brazilian regulatory filing made during the antitrust review, PIF holds 93.4% of the equity, Silver Lake holds 5.5%, and Affinity Partners holds 1.1%. Neither EA nor the consortium published those percentages in their own announcements, so treat the exact figures as reported through a regulator rather than confirmed by the parties.

What that split means is straightforward. This is a Saudi state acquisition with two financial partners attached. Silver Lake brings technology operating experience and a co-chief executive, Egon Durban, with a long record in software buyouts. Affinity Partners brings a stake small enough that its economic role is close to symbolic, and a founder whose political relationships were widely discussed in coverage of the deal's regulatory path.

Trip Hawkins has no ownership position in EA today. He stepped back from running the company in 1991, left the board in the 1990s, and went on to found 3DO. No founder equity survives in the current structure.

The shareholders who mattered before August 2026 were index funds and institutional managers, the ordinary composition of a large-cap Nasdaq company. All of them were cashed out at $210 per share. Nothing rolled over except PIF's own position. That distinction matters: a public shareholder who liked EA had no option to stay invested, which is the normal outcome of a cash merger and the reason such deals draw close scrutiny on price.

The one exception is management. EA's executives held unvested equity awards at closing, and change-of-control terms govern how those convert. Andrew Wilson's own arrangements have been reported to be worth up to roughly $125 million if he is removed after the transaction, on top of the $38.6 million he was paid for fiscal 2026. Those are reported figures drawn from EA's last public filings rather than terms the new owners have confirmed.

EA never raised venture rounds in the modern sense. Its capital history is a public listing, four decades of acquisitions funded from cash and stock, and then a single buyout that reversed the whole structure.

The Public Investment Fund is the controlling owner. It is a state fund managing assets on the order of a trillion dollars, and gaming has been one of its most concentrated bets. Through Savvy Games Group, its gaming subsidiary, PIF bought the esports operators ESL and FACEIT in 2022 and acquired the mobile publisher Scopely for just under $5 billion in 2023. It has separately built minority stakes across the industry, including reported positions in Nintendo, Take-Two Interactive, Capcom, and Embracer Group. EA is the first time it has taken outright control of a major Western publisher.

Silver Lake is the operating partner in the group. It is one of the largest technology-focused investment firms in the world, with roughly $114 billion in assets under management, and its co-chief executive Egon Durban was the executive Jared Kushner approached in August 2025 to start the deal. Silver Lake's history in take-privates, including Dell and Endeavor, is what it contributes beyond its 5.5% check.

Affinity Partners is the smallest holder. Founded by Jared Kushner in 2021, it raised much of its capital from Gulf state investors, including PIF itself. Its 1.1% stake gives it limited economic exposure. Its presence in the consortium drew far more attention than its size, because the buyer group needed clearance from a United States national security review conducted by an administration in which Kushner's father-in-law is president.

There is no IPO signal here, because the transaction ran in the opposite direction. What replaces public market discipline is credit market discipline. EA now has roughly $18 billion of funded debt against about $2.2 billion before the deal, and it has bondholders and loan investors who receive information the public does not.

That is a real accountability channel, but a narrow one. Lenders care about cash flow available to service interest, not creative direction or the number of games EA ships. The first public evidence of that gap came through the debt marketing process, when reporting indicated EA had told investors it was targeting roughly $700 million of annual cost reductions, including about $170 million from what it called organizational efficiencies. That target was disclosed to lenders, not to players or staff.

Andrew Wilson remains chairman and chief executive officer. He joined EA in 2000, rose through the EA Sports organization, and became chief executive in September 2013. He is the person the consortium explicitly bought into: EA's own announcement of the deal described him as a chief executive who had doubled revenue, nearly tripled EBITDA, and driven a fivefold increase in market capitalization. Keeping him is a confirmed term of the transaction.

Laura Miele serves as chief operating officer and is the most senior executive over EA's studios and development organization. She is the internal counterweight to a financial owner, and the person whose remit covers the studios most exposed to the cost reduction target.

On the owner side, Egon Durban of Silver Lake and Turqi Alnowaiser of PIF are the two figures who spoke publicly at closing, which is a reasonable signal of who represents the capital. Alnowaiser framed entertainment and sports as strategic priorities for PIF. Durban framed EA's franchises in terms of creative talent and player focus.

The full post-close board has not been disclosed. That is normal for a private company and it is also the single largest gap in public knowledge about EA today. Before the deal, EA had an independent board with Wilson as chair and Luis Ubiñas as lead independent director. What is confirmed is that PIF's 93.4% economic stake gives it control of whatever governance structure now exists. What is inferred, and not confirmed, is how many seats each consortium member holds and whether any independent directors were retained.

The deal's most contested regulatory question was whether a Saudi state fund should control a company that holds behavioral, communications, and payment data on hundreds of millions of players. In October 2025, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren wrote to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urging the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to apply searching scrutiny, citing arguments that PIF's gaming investments serve Saudi soft power objectives. The Communications Workers of America separately wrote to CFIUS and the Federal Trade Commission, flagging EA's artificial intelligence work under foreign ownership.

The deal cleared. EA confirmed in a filing on July 30, 2026, that it had obtained every regulatory approval required to close, and the European Commission had signed off on July 23 after finding no competition concerns. The unresolved question is how the CFIUS process concluded, since the outcome of a CFIUS review is typically not published in detail. Critics, including commentators who wrote about the review before it ended, argued that a buyer group including the president's son-in-law faced a structurally compromised process. That is a criticism of the process, not a documented finding of wrongdoing.

The financial risk is easier to quantify than the political one. EA's funded debt went from roughly $2.2 billion to about $18 billion at close, with $20 billion committed. Against fiscal 2026 net bookings of $8.03 billion, that is a heavy structure for a business whose biggest releases are annual and whose live services revenue can move with player sentiment.

Interest comes before everything else. Reported estimates of EA's annual interest burden run near $1.8 billion, which would consume a large share of the company's operating cash flow before a single game is funded. JPMorgan committed the entire $20 billion itself, an unusually concentrated underwriting, and spent the first quarter of 2026 selling it down through an $8 billion high-yield bond offering and term loans syndicated across more than a dozen banks. The leveraged finance market was nervous at the time about software credits and artificial intelligence disruption, which made the sale a genuine test rather than a formality.

EA was cutting jobs before the buyout and kept cutting during it. In 2026 the company reduced headcount at DICE, Criterion Games, Ripple Effect, and Motive Studio in March, all four of which had worked on Battlefield 6, and it cut more than 300 roles across Respawn Entertainment and other studios. Those cuts landed in the same fiscal year that Andrew Wilson's total compensation reached $38.6 million, up about 27% on the prior year.

The United Videogame Workers arm of the CWA criticized the transaction as an exercise in padding investor returns at workers' expense. The $700 million cost reduction target shared with debt investors gives that criticism a specific number to point at. Whether it translates into further studio closures is not confirmed, and EA has not published a plan.

A separate controversy arose around whether Saudi ownership would affect content, particularly in The Sims, a franchise with a large LGBTQ player base and a long record of inclusive design. Several prominent creators, including Kayla Sims, James Turner, and Jesse McNamara, left EA's creator program after the deal was announced. Maxis, the EA studio behind The Sims, said the game's focus on inclusivity would not change.

No documented instance of owner-directed content change has emerged. The concern is anticipatory, and it is worth stating plainly as such. It is also not unreasonable, because content decisions inside a private company are invisible in a way they are not at a listed one.

The clearest way to read this deal is as two separate transactions stacked on top of each other. One is a sovereign wealth fund buying a strategic cultural asset. The other is a conventional leveraged buyout. They pull in different directions.

A sovereign fund with a trillion-dollar balance sheet and a national development mandate can afford patience. PIF does not need EA to return capital on a seven-year fund clock, and its stated interest in entertainment and sports suggests it values EA for reach and relevance as much as for cash flow. That argues for stability, continued investment, and a willingness to fund expensive projects like Battlefield that public shareholders punished EA for when they slipped. It is a genuinely different owner profile from the private equity firms that have bought other consumer businesses.

The $18 billion of debt argues the opposite. Interest of roughly $1.8 billion a year is a fixed claim that does not care about strategic patience, and the $700 million cost reduction target was set for lenders rather than players. The combination of a patient equity owner and an impatient capital structure is unusual, and how it resolves depends on which constraint binds first. If EA's live services hold up, the debt is serviceable and PIF gets its long-term asset. If Ultimate Team spending softens or a major release misses, cost cutting becomes the only lever available.

For players, the immediate practical change is a loss of visibility. EA will no longer publish quarterly bookings, live services breakdowns, or engagement commentary. The industry's clearest window into how much people spend on football card packs has closed. For developers, the change is a shift in who decides. Studio budgets will be set against a debt schedule rather than an earnings call, and the workforce has already been told through the credit markets that $700 million is coming out. For the wider games business, the significance is competitive: EA is now a state-backed publisher competing with Microsoft, Sony's PlayStation business, and privately held rivals like Epic Games and Roblox, and it can outspend most of them without asking a shareholder first.

EA is owned by a consortium of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners, which completed a $55 billion take-private on August 4, 2026. A Brazilian regulatory filing put the equity split at 93.4% for PIF, 5.5% for Silver Lake, and 1.1% for Affinity Partners, which makes PIF the controlling owner by a wide margin.

No. EA common stock ceased trading and was delisted from the Nasdaq when the buyout closed on August 4, 2026. The company had been public since 1989. There is no EA ticker to buy, and the company no longer files quarterly earnings reports or proxy statements.

Trip Hawkins founded Electronic Arts on May 27, 1982, in San Mateo, California, after leaving a marketing role at Apple. He funded it with a reported $200,000 of his own money plus early venture capital. He stepped back from leading the company in 1991 and holds no ownership stake today.

Andrew Wilson has been chief executive since September 2013 and remains chairman and CEO under the new owners. He joined EA in 2000 and rose through the EA Sports organization. His continued leadership was an explicit part of the transaction. He was paid $38.6 million in total compensation for fiscal 2026.

The deal valued EA at approximately $55 billion, or $210 per share in cash, a 25% premium to the unaffected closing price of $168.32 on September 25, 2025. It was funded with roughly $36 billion of equity, including the rollover of PIF's existing 9.9% stake, and $20 billion of debt committed entirely by JPMorgan, of which about $18 billion was funded at close. It is the largest leveraged buyout ever completed.

EA has said its headquarters, name, and leadership stay in place. What has changed is the financial structure: the company now carries roughly $18 billion of debt, and reporting indicates it told lenders it is targeting about $700 million of annual cost reductions. EA had already cut staff at DICE, Criterion, Ripple Effect, Motive, and Respawn during 2026. Concerns raised by creators about content direction under Saudi ownership have not been matched by any documented change, and Maxis has said The Sims will keep its focus on inclusivity.