EA employees and U.S. senators raise concerns over buyout

Resistance against the planned Saudi Arabia-backed buyout of EA is mounting: Workers and two U.S. senators have raised concerns over the proposed $55 billion USD deal, which would take EA off the stock market and under private ownership of a group that includes the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, private equity firm Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners.

In a public statement the video game workers’ union UVW-CWA said that the deal “will further concentrate power and wealth into the hands of a few gatekeepers while doing nothing to address the concerns of players and workers.” It noted that EA “is not a struggling company” and criticized that “the very people who will be jeopardized as a result of this deal, were not represented at all when this buyout was negotiated or discussed.”

Analysts are already predicting that EA would have to lay off employees to cut costs in order to shoulder the $20b of debt it’s set to take on as part of the agreement, which the union called out as well: “If jobs are lost or studios are closed due to this deal, that would be a choice, not a necessity, made to pad investors’ pockets — not to strengthen the company.”

The UVW-CWA added: “Every time private equity or billionaire investors take a studio private, workers lose visibility, transparency, and power. Decisions that shape our jobs, our art, and our futures are made behind closed doors by executives who have never written a line of code, built worlds, or supported live services. We are calling on regulators and elected officials to scrutinize this deal and ensure that any path forward protects jobs, preserves creative freedom, and keeps decision-making accountable to the workers who make EA successful.”

U.S. senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal have expressed their own concerns about the deal in two open letters sent to EA CEO Andrew Wilson and Scott Bessent, the U.S. Treasury Secretary.

The two senators warned that the “proposed transaction poses a number of significant foreign influences and national security risks, beginning with the PIF’s reputation as a strategic arm of the Saudi government.”

They questioned the economic benefit of the deal for the buyers, indicating that these possess different motives for wanting to own EA — such as “[advancing] Saudi Arabia’s objective to exert influence over important American cultural institutions.”

“The deal’s potential to expand and strengthen Saudi foreign influence in the United States is compounded by the national security risks raised by the Saudi government’s access to and unchecked influence over the sensitive personal information collected from EA’s customers, its development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, and the company’s product design and direction,” the letter to Wilson added.

The senators ended the letter by posing several questions to Wilson, challenging him to explain “why EA’s customers should have confidence that they will not be targets of Saudi covert propaganda or other influence when they interact with EA’s video games, and how EA will ensure that the PIF or the government of Saudi Arabia is not able to influence or dictate the content or narratives of EA’s games.”

In the letter to Bessent, the two senators raised concerns about Kushner’s involvement in the deal, quoting an analyst who doubted that regulators would give the transaction the scrutiny it deserves due to the president’s son-in-law being in the mix.

As such, it’s questionable whether this resistance will have any success in stopping the deal from happening.

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