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?'”
Even disregarding any potential political shenanigans, the senators say the deal demands scrutiny because of its “potential to expand and strengthen Saudi foreign influence in the United States.” EA has a huge user base, from which it has collected (and will continue to collect) a massive trove of personal information over the years—all of which will effectively be at the fingertips of the Saudi government. Furthermore, because EA will be taken private once the deal is concluded, there will be no oversight from the SEC.
What regulator is going to say no to the president’s son-in-law?’
“The unrestricted access to this information by a repressive, authoritarian government poses significant potential risks of surveillance of Americans, covert Saudi propaganda, and selective retaliation and censorship of persons disfavored by the Saudi government,” the letter states.
“The PIF’s control over EA’s operations could extend to influencing or directing the company’s design, features, and product decisions to advance the Saudi government’s specific and long-term objectives. PIF would be well positioned to dictate or veto what stories are told to Americans through the popular medium of video games, controlling narratives about US history and culture. In short, the Saudi government’s ability to exert its influence through EA would offer the authoritarian regime an effective tool to project power worldwide. As one analyst observed, ‘Saudi Arabia clearly recognizes the political and cultural influence of video games, especially among young people’.”
I want to tap the brakes here for just a minute to ponder the irony. The US has, for generations, leaned heavily into cultural hegemony to exert its influence around the world, in videogames as much as any other medium. (There is no more influential cultural lever than Hollywood, for example.) Americans and their allies are the good guys, even when they’re not, a perspective that persists in contemporary videogame storytelling: The notorious Highway of Death massacre as it was depicted in the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare reboot, for instance, was carried out not by Western forces (as happened in real life) but by Russia, while the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani by US forces, widely regarded as a violation of international law, is instead cool and good in Modern Warfare 2.
The unrestricted access to this information by a repressive, authoritarian government poses significant potential risks of surveillance of Americans, covert Saudi propaganda, and selective retaliation and censorship of persons disfavored by the Saudi government
In that light, one might take the senatorial concern about the stories EA will tell once it’s in Saudi hands with a pinch of salt. At the same time, though, there’s no denying that Saudi Arabia is, as the letter puts it, ruled by an “oppressive, authoritarian government” with a grim record on human rights, whose de facto ruler (and PIF chairman) is widely believed to have ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
Which, say Blumenthal and Warren, is why at the very least this proposed deal warrants a closer look. They’re calling for a “thorough investigation” of the buyout by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, particularly with an eye to ensuring the PIF and Saudi government don’t misuse personal information belonging to American customers, gain access to sensitive technologies (in particular artificial intelligence), or “use its control of EA to take action to impair US national security.”
Observations about the situational application of soft power aside, I think the concerns expressed by Blumenthal and Warren are valid. Whether the EA deal will face any meaningful challenge is an open question, though: Blumenthal and Warren are both Democrats, for one thing, the party recently described by Trump deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller as a “domestic extremist organization,” in case you were holding out hope for bipartisan cooperation on the matter. Bessent, the secretary of the treasury, is a stalwart backer of Donald Trump, while FTC chair Andrew Ferguson, who was appointed to the head of the agency by Trump, has indicated that he will be less aggressive in scrutinizing mergers than his predecessor, Lina Khan, who recently pointed out that everything she predicted about Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard is coming true.
