Electronic Arts shareholders approved the company's $55 billion take-private acquisition by a consortium comprising Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake Partners, and Affinity Partners — Jared Kushner's private equity vehicle — in a vote that sent the deal into a regulatory review process that has produced no public disclosures in over nine months [1]. The deal announced in September 2025 carries an outside date of September 28, 2026. The HSR antitrust waiting period has expired. What has not been resolved, publicly, is the CFIUS review [2].

The CFIUS silence is the story. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States examines acquisitions of American companies by foreign-controlled entities for national security implications. A Saudi sovereign wealth fund taking a majority stake in a company whose game titles include military simulations, whose development infrastructure sits in multiple U.S. states, and whose player data includes biometric and behavioral profiles of millions of Americans is precisely the category of transaction CFIUS scrutinizes carefully [2]. The fact that the HSR review expired — confirming no structural antitrust problem — does not address CFIUS's separate statutory mandate.

The ownership structure compounds the sensitivity. PIF, which already held a near-10-percent stake in EA before the deal, will become the majority owner with an estimated 93-to-94-percent holding [1]. Affinity Partners — founded by Kushner, the former senior White House official — holds a minority position alongside Silver Lake [3]. The combination of a close-ally sovereign wealth fund and a former senior official's fund in the same acquisition means any CFIUS finding is also a political sensitivity that limits the range of public disclosure available to the review committee.

EA's fiscal year 2027 begins July 1, 2026 — the deal was expected to close in Q1 of that year [2]. The outside date is September 28. With no public CFIUS clearance and an EU Foreign Subsidies review carrying a July 30 decision date, the deal has approximately twelve weeks to resolve both. The EU's FSR review — examining whether the sovereign wealth backing constitutes an unfair state subsidy — is the closer deadline [2]. The acquirers have told the commission they are seeking approval by end of July.

What is not publicly known: whether CFIUS has identified a specific security concern requiring remediation, whether mitigation negotiations are ongoing, or whether the review is near completion and simply undisclosed. The deal's principals have not said which of those conditions obtains. Silence, in CFIUS reviews, is not evidence of a clean process — it is the normal condition under which these reviews operate.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco