EA is Private Now. The Staff Cutting Started Months Ago

Six weeks before Electronic Arts stopped being a public company, it laid off the people who answer its players' support tickets. The cuts, reported by Kotaku on June 22, reached the Fan Care customer support division, the trust and safety teams that police EA's online lobbies, internal IT, and recruitment. They landed on remote workers in the United States and on veterans at EA's Hyderabad office, some with more than a decade at the company. EA declined to give a headcount.

The deal's clearance arrived on July 30. In a filing that day, EA told the SEC that every regulatory approval required to complete the merger had been obtained, and that it expected to close on or about the end of trading on August 4. The following Tuesday, the largest leveraged buyout in history was finished: $55 billion, $210 per share in cash, and the end of a run on the Nasdaq that began in 1989.

The owners have arrived. What they inherit is a company that spent the year before their arrival cutting staff three times while posting record bookings, and a balance sheet now carrying $20 billion USD of borrowing that was raised to buy it. Servicing that debt will cost more each year than EA earned in profit last year.

The Deal

The terms have not moved since Sep 29, when EA agreed to be taken private by a consortium of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, the technology-focused private equity firm Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners, the investment firm founded by Jared Kushner. Shareholders received $210 per share in cash, a 25% premium to the undisturbed price, at an enterprise value of roughly $55B. That figure moved past the $45B TXU buyout of 2007 to become the largest leveraged buyout on record.

The approvals came in over ten months: shareholders on Dec 22, with roughly 99% of votes cast in favor; U.S. antitrust clearance under Hart-Scott-Rodino; European merger clearance on July 23 with the Commission finding no competition concerns; and clearance under the EU's Foreign Subsidies Regulation, the tougher of the two European tests, on July 30.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, one of the reviews that pushed the deal past its original June 30 deadline, was never announced as cleared on its own; it simply disappeared into a blanket sentence in EA's July 30 filing.

Of the $55B, about $36B was equity. PIF rolled over the 9.9% stake it already held, worth roughly $5.2B at the deal price, and added fresh cash to reach about 93.4% of the company. Silver Lake took roughly 5.5% and Affinity Partners roughly 1.1%. The last $20B was debt, committed by JPMorgan, with about $18B funding at close through syndicated loans and high yield bonds. EA's own cash build covered most of the rest. That debt sits on EA, to be repaid out of EA's own cash flows.

Those cash flows are healthy without being limitless. In the fiscal year that ended March 31, EA reported net revenue of $7.53B, up 1%, record net bookings of $8.03B, and operating cash flow of $2.55B. Net income fell 21% to $887M. Set that against the borrowing. The bonds priced in March, between 6.25% and 8.75% depending on currency and seniority, and the term loans at 350 basis points over benchmark rates. Servicing $18B on those terms runs comfortably past what EA earned last year. Credit researchers at Octus model the structure at 7.4 times leverage, with free cash flow covering interest less than two times over.

Cuts Before Close

In February, EA reduced staff at Full Circle, the studio behind the long-delayed skate. reboot. On March 9 it cut an undisclosed number of jobs across all four Battlefield Studios: DICE, Criterion, Ripple Effect and Motive. Battlefield 6 had just sold more than 7M copies in its first three days, finished 2025 as the best-selling game in the United States, and won game of the year at the Ukie Video Game Awards that same month. EA said at the time the cuts reflected "select changes within our Battlefield organization" to better align teams around what matters most to the community. The June round then moved off the development floor entirely, into the functions that keep a live service publisher running: support, moderation, hiring, infrastructure.

Eight months earlier, in a supplemental FAQ filed with the SEC, EA had told staff there would be "no immediate changes to your job, team, or daily work," a promise Respawn's news desk noted when the June cuts surfaced. The internal email that reached the Fan Care team explained, per Kotaku, that the company needed to "adapt how we work to better meet fans' changing needs."

When I examined GTA VI's gravitational pull on 2026, the investment data pointed one way: venture money in retreat, with the year set to be driven by incumbents and acquirers instead. EA is that forecast at record scale.

What the Year Was Worth

Days before the deal closed, EA filed an amended annual report with the SEC. Chief executive Andrew Wilson's total compensation for fiscal 2026 came to $38.65M, against $30.53M the year before and $25.64M the year before that. The package breaks down as $1.3M in base salary, $6.5M in non-equity incentive pay, which is the cash bonus tied to the year's performance targets, $28.4M in stock awards, and $2.37M in other compensation, and a line that this year absorbed the cost of private air travel for all of Wilson's trips, business and personal, on the recommendation of a June 2025 security assessment. The same filing puts Wilson's pay at 305 times that of the median EA employee, who earned $126,612.

The incentive program credited Battlefield 6 with a "high-quality launch." It credited interim milestones on future Battlefield releases, retention numbers at EA Sports FC, and progress across skate., Apex Legends, and The Sims. Full Circle had been cut in February. The Battlefield studios had been cut in March.

The same filing credits Wilson for the year's generative AI progress: partnerships signed and adoption raised across priority areas. That sat in a document alongside a fiscal year in which EA reduced its customer support, IT and trust and safety headcount, the functions most exposed to automation. The filing draws no connection between the two.

In a leveraged buyout, recurring costs removed before close are worth many times their face value. A dollar of annual savings improves the earnings number a $55B valuation hangs off, and it widens the coverage ratio JPMorgan's lending syndicate underwrites against. Cuts made now surface as clean run-rate savings in the first quarter the new owners report to their lenders.

Roughly three quarters of Wilson's package is equity, ordinarily the instrument that ties an executive to a long horizon, unvested and exposed to whatever the share price does over years. And it carries performance conditions, measured over three years: relative and absolute total shareholder return, alongside net bookings and non-GAAP operating income. But under a $210 per share all-cash take-private, shareholder return is no longer an open question, because the merger agreement fixed the share price at $210. Equity here is a holding with a known value and a settlement date. Wilson remains chief executive and is now a shareholder in the private company.

What Leverage Did Last Time

Gaming has run this experiment before, at a smaller scale and by accident. Embracer Group, the Swedish holding company, spent the low-interest years buying over a hundred studios with borrowed money. The logic held right up until a partnership worth more than $2B in contracted development revenue collapsed. The counterparty that walked away was Savvy Games Group, the games arm of the same Public Investment Fund that just bought EA. What followed was a restructuring that cut roughly 4.5K jobs, closed or sold dozens of studios, and ended with Embracer splitting itself into three separate companies.

The comparison is imperfect in a way that should worry EA employees. Embracer's debt was the residue of overreach, and its cuts were a failure state. EA's debt is the design. The financial model that justifies a $55B price assumes cost discipline from the first quarter. The fund behind the exit that broke Embracer arrived at EA owning roughly 93%, this time with the debt already attached.

Three Owners, Three Clocks

What the new owners want from EA differs for each. PIF holds the overwhelming majority. Its games arm, Savvy Games Group, holds about 10% each of Koei Tecmo, NCSoft, Nexon and Square Enix. Those positions serve Vision 2030's project of building Saudi Arabia an entertainment economy, and they can sit for decades before returning anything.

A private equity fund like Silver Lake, however, returns money on cycles, and its position only pays through a future exit, a relisting or a sale at a higher multiple, which requires the earnings line to grow visibly within a handful of years. Affinity Partners, the smallest member, brings less capital than proximity: its founder is the son-in-law of the sitting U.S. president, and one of the deal's gatekeepers was a committee of that president's administration.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal wrote to the Treasury in October citing, in their words, "profound concern" about foreign influence and national security risks. Wilson has assured staff the company's values will "remain unchanged" under the new owners.

For the balance sheet, though, the clock that matters is Silver Lake's. A sovereign holder can absorb flat years. An exit-driven partner needs margin expansion it can show a buyer, and margin expansion at a company carrying $20B of debt, with 71% of revenue already coming from live services, tends to arrive through two doors: costs go down, or monetization goes up.

Close                                                  

EA stopped behaving like a public company long before it stopped being one. In October 2025, weeks after the deal was announced, it dropped its quarterly analyst call and withdrew forward-looking guidance. Three more quarters passed that way: results filed, no questions taken. The quarter that ended June 30 was not reported at all. EA filed to delist from the Nasdaq, and its investor relations site is gone. A company that sold roughly $8B of games last year now reports to its lenders and its owners, and to nobody else.

What is on the record is the year that just ended. EA cut staff in February, in March and in June, posted record bookings, and awarded its chief executive $38.65M. It now carries $20B of debt raised to purchase it, against $887M of profit. The cuts started while the deal was still waiting on Washington. The bill arrived first, and EA had already begun paying.