On Tuesday, August 4, Electronic Arts stops being a public company. A consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners closes a roughly $55 billion take-private — the largest leveraged buyout ever recorded, at $210 a share, funded with about $36 billion in equity and $20 billion in committed debt. CEO Andrew Wilson keeps his job. The shareholders who could have voted on the company's politics will not exist anymore.
The Number That Makes This Story
Here is the receipt that matters. In February, the Human Rights Campaign published its 2026 Corporate Equality Index — the LGBTQ workplace scorecard that functioned for two decades as corporate America's social credit rating. Fortune 500 participation fell 65% in a single year, from 377 companies down to 131. That is 246 of the biggest companies in America deciding, all at once, that they no longer wanted the grade. CNBC and Fox News both reported the collapse. HRC's own framing was that this reflects "a shift in how employers are approaching transparency" — which is a long way of saying they left.
Among the companies that walked: Tractor Supply, Walmart, Ford Motor, and Lowe's. Tractor Supply — the first Fortune 300 company to kill its DEI and ESG commitments outright, back in June 2024 — now carries a 10/100 on our scale, one of the lowest scores of any national retailer we rate. Walmart still sits at 90/100, Ford at 66/100, and Lowe's at 64/100, because leaving an index is not the same thing as changing your policies. But they left.
Electronic Arts did not leave. Our brand file records EA holding a perfect 100 on the 2026 index and taking the Equality 100 Award alongside the 533 other companies that scored full marks. In a year when a quarter of the Fortune 500 stopped filling out the form, EA filled out the form.
Why EA Scores 80/100
EA lands at 80/100 — extremely woke on the BuyWokeFree scale, and the breakdown is more interesting than the headline.
- Pride and LGBTQ programming: still shipping. Pride content remains in The Sims, and Apex Legends maintains an openly LGBTQ character roster. This is product, not a press release — it is the part of EA's politics you actually buy.
- HRC Corporate Equality Index: a perfect score, per our brand file, held while the index's Fortune 500 base collapsed around it.
- DEI infrastructure: intact. Our researchers found EA quietly scrubbed explicit DEI language from its annual filings and Impact Report beginning around May 2024 — but the underlying DEI Council and seven employee resource groups, including PRIDE, survived the edit. The words went. The apparatus stayed.
- Political giving: this is where EA breaks the pattern, and we will say so plainly. Contrary to a claim that circulates constantly online, EA operates no corporate PAC and has done no federal lobbying since 2010. On the political-contributions dimension, EA is close to a non-participant. That restraint is the single biggest reason it sits at 80 and not at 100.
That distinction matters, and it is the difference between a scorecard and a smear. Microsoft — EA's largest competitor in gaming — scores a full 100/100, with a Global D&I division, perfect CEI record, CEO Action signatory status, and north of $25 million in political spending. EA does the culture. Microsoft does the culture and writes the checks.
The Rest of the Gaming Scoreboard
EA is not an outlier in its industry so much as the loudest holdout in a category that is quietly deflating:
- Microsoft — 100/100. The maximum score on every dimension we measure.
- Sony — 80/100. Global Pride sponsorships from Tokyo to San Diego, perfect CEI scores, DEI programs across every division. Sony spent the last week being boycotted from the left over a Spider-Man producer and from the right over killing physical discs in 2028. The score did not move, because the score tracks policy, not the news cycle.
- Electronic Arts — 80/100.
- Activision Blizzard — 55/100.
- Take-Two Interactive — 55/100, and trending down. As reported by GameFile, Take-Two deleted its LGBTQ accolades and renamed its "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" disclosure to "Community & Engagement" in 2025, keeping that language into its FY2026 filing. It now frames hiring around merit. This is what the retreat looks like when a publisher actually does it.
- Ubisoft — 45/100. Still the most vocally DEI-forward publisher in gaming with no sign of a rollback, though as a French company much of its social disclosure is mandated by EU law rather than chosen. Its US political footprint is effectively zero.
Compare that spread to our non-woke video game brands and gaming and interactive entertainment category pages and the shape is obvious: the industry's two biggest names are also its two most committed, and the scores drop as the studios get smaller and less exposed to American institutional pressure.
Does Saudi Ownership Change Anything?
This is the question everyone is going to ask on Tuesday, and the honest answer is: we do not know yet, and nobody who tells you otherwise does either.
What we can say is structural. A public EA answered to index funds, proxy advisors, and shareholder resolutions — the exact machinery that built the DEI era in the first place. A private EA owned overwhelmingly by a sovereign wealth fund answers to one owner. The pressure that produced the perfect CEI score is being removed. Whether the score follows is a 2027 question.
It is also worth noting who is actually angry about this deal. The organized backlash to the EA buyout has come from the left, not the right — objections to Saudi ownership, to Kushner's involvement, to the debt load. Conservatives have largely been indifferent. That is an unusual alignment, and it is a reminder that "woke" and "unpopular with the right" are not the same measurement.
The Bottom Line
Electronic Arts scores 80/100. It earned that by keeping a perfect LGBTQ workplace rating in the year 246 Fortune 500 companies walked away from one, and by shipping Pride content in the products themselves. It avoided a 100 only because it does not buy politicians.
If that matters to how you spend, EA's catalog is most of what you would recognize — Madden, EA Sports FC, The Sims, Apex Legends, Battlefield. The alternatives inside gaming are not clean either; Ubisoft at 45 is the lowest major publisher we rate, and that is still "woke" on our scale. This is a category with no 10/100 Tractor Supply in it yet.
Check the score before you preorder. On August 4, the company you are buying from changes owners — but not, as of today, its politics.