The $55 billion buyout of Electronic Arts by a consortium that includes Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners investment firm has resulted in no small amount of consternation among observers. Much of that arises from the perceived likelihood of a less-than-ideal long-term outcome for EA, its creative output, and its staff—but some elements of the US government are also uncertain about the whole thing for different reasons: In a letter to US treasury secretary Scott Bessent, senators Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren expressed “profound concern about the foreign influence and national security risks” that could result from the takeover.
“The proposed transaction poses a number of significant foreign influence and national security risks, beginning with the PIF’s reputation as a strategic arm of the Saudi government,” the letter states, all but explicitly pointing the finger at longstanding allegations of “sportswashing” being conducted by Saudi Arabia via millions of dollars invested in sports, videogames, and “other cultural institutions.”
Arguing that these deals aren’t just about money, “they are about influence,” the senators also note that the agreed purchase price represents a significant and largely unjustified premium over EA’s actual value: “Saudi Arabia’s desire to buy influence through the acquisition of EA is apparent on the face of the transaction—the investors propose to pay more than $10 billion above EA’s trading value for a company whose stock has ‘stagnated for half a decade’ in an unpredictably volatile industry.”
Of course, there’s also the matter of Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of current US president Donald Trump, whose Affinity Partners received an investment of $2 billion from the PIF just six months after stepping down as senior advisor to the president in 2021, during Trump’s first term. The senators say his role in this deal “raises troubling questions about whether Mr. Kushner is involved in the transaction solely to ensure the federal government’s approval of the transaction,” adding, “consistent with the Trump administration’s unprecedented corruption and monetization of federal government power, ‘What regulator is going to say no to the president’s son-in-law?'”
