This is why EA is going private - DTNS 5114

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2:36Tom Merritt: This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, September 29th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know. We follow up on context and help each other understand.

2:45Robb Dunewood: Today, why EA is leaving the game of being a publicly traded company and what that means for us, the gamers.

2:52Tom Merritt: I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Rob Dunwood. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. Now, listen, Rob. Jason got to go to Ireland to cover a bunch of startups, and he's going to come back tomorrow and talk about it. So we'll have to keep our jealousy under control. But the big story today is that Electronic Arts announced that a partnership of Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia's public investment fund, and Affinity Partners will pay$55 billion for a leveraged buyout, taking the gaming company private. EA CEO Andrew Wilson is expected to stay on after the sale. And that sale is not going to happen anytime soon.

3:33Tom Merritt: We'll get to that in a second. PIF, the Saudi Arabian Investment Fund, already had a 9.9 % stake in EA. So that's part of this. And PIF has been expanding its gaming stakes lately. It's got stakes in Nintendo. Minority stakes, but significant ones. Take-Two, Activision Blizzard. Yeah, Microsoft owns most of it, but PIF has a little chunk. Capcom, Nexon, Koei Tecmo made big news when Scopely, which is owned by PIF, bought Pokemon Go. Scopely also operates Monopoly Go. So that's one of the owners here. Silver Lake, longtime Silicon Valley investment fund, helped Dell go private in 2013. Its name has been associated with the TikTok acquisition that might happen soon.

4:20Tom Merritt: That's the other one. And then Affinity Partner is Jared Kushner's company. He's the CEO. If for some reason you don't recognize his name. He's married to the president's daughter. And Affinity Partners has mostly invested in Israeli startups over the course of its lifetime. But lately, it's been getting into bigger things. This would be the biggest thing it's been involved in yet. EA has not grown as fast as investors think it could, but it is far from a struggling business. Brought in$7.5 billion in revenue in the 2025 fiscal year, has Madden, has what used to be FIFA, now called EA Sports FC.

5:01Tom Merritt: And everybody thinks it's going to have a really good success in Battlefield 6, which is scheduled for release on October 10th. And it makes a bunch of iconic franchises. So it's got a good back catalog, The Sims, Dragon Age, Plants vs. Zombies. Last year, EA made four of the top 10 best-selling games of the year. So the deal is that EA sees that it may be topping out. It's having a hard time seeing if it can keep the hits coming. Like Battlefield 6 is going to run into Grand Theft Auto and some other stuff. So maybe it won't be able to sustain it. So these three companies are offering an estimated 25 % premium over the stock market valuation at the time of this announcement.

5:45Tom Merritt: A lot of folks are like, man, maybe they should wait till Battlefield 6 comes out in the stock prices up, but they're getting a 25 % premium. So maybe it's an offer they can't refuse. It would make it the largest leveraged buyout ever. A leveraged buyout just means that a significant portion of it is borrowed. JPMorgan Chase is lending$20 billion for this acquisition. And after a regulatory review happens, the deal is expected to close in early 2027, Q1 2027. So forget about this for the EA releases of the future, right? Because this is not going to happen next year. It's going to happen in 2027.

6:21Tom Merritt: But it's an interesting move. Reportedly, EA talked to Sony. They talked to Apple. They talked to Amazon. They talked to NBCUniversal over the past several years. And they all found EA to be too expensive. So, Rob, what do you make of all this? How is this going to affect the games we play?

6:39Robb Dunewood: Well, it's not going to affect the games that we play at all this year and probably at least for the first three quarters of 2026. However, if we can assume that a leverage buyout of this size abides by the same physics and rules that other leverage buyouts abide by, a lot of stuff's going to get sold in late, late, late 2026, early 2027 and definitely once this thing goes through. Why do I say that? Because that's just what these things do. That's just how they operate. The goal is let's get as much money as we can right now and then sell the really, really, really cool things for parts and continue to see how much money we can ultimately get.

7:24Robb Dunewood: If that is the case, though, that is a big deal for EA. EA is one of the biggest names in gaming. So to see it potentially get sold off, like I said, I don't know that that's going to be the case. but that's generally what happens when you see leveraged buyouts. It's like they extract the value out of what they've bought as quickly as they possibly can to get the return on their value because this money is owed.

7:50Tom Merritt: Yeah. These are big names. So PIF doesn't generally do the fixer-upper strategy that you're talking to. Silver Lake might, but that's not what it's known for. Neither is Affinity for that matter. But it is a leveraged buyout, right? And if it walks like a duck and clacks like a duck might be a duck. So I feel like it's more than just, you know, private equity firm comes in, buys failing publisher, uh, you know, squeezes all the money out of it. It can't, lays everybody off and gets it efficient and then turns it around, sells it off for parts. Uh, it's not going to be exactly like that. I do think you're right that if everybody was coming to EA and saying, I'm sorry, it's too much to swallow at once.

8:34Tom Merritt: the strategy might be for these companies to say, well, let's make it so that it's not too much to swallow at once or divide things up in a way that makes it easier to sell. And when you're public, you can do that, but you have to convince all your shareholders. You have to convince your board. And that's a lot harder. If Silver Lake, PIF and Affinity are coming in with that as their idea, they're already convinced and they don't have to report to shareholders because they're taking it private. Yeah.

9:02Robb Dunewood: The other thing that you have to think about as well is that even if someone wanted to buy this at the premium that they're getting right now, if they, we can do that, but is the government going to allow us to? Because there's only a few companies that could spend this kind of money on this. And they are named Sony. They are named Microsoft. They are big, ginormous companies that have to go through enormous amounts of regulation. And even though, So, you know, once this becomes a private equity deal, those type of companies will still have to jump through a few hoops. They won't have to jump through all the hoops.

9:37Robb Dunewood: They'll just have to jump through a few because of how big they are and how much they want to spend on a private thing that they might purchase. It's not all the regulatory stuff that they would have to go through while these companies are, you know, are public. So I hate to see this for an EA. But like I said, if the if the physics work the same, you will see, say, hey, who wants to buy Madden? Who wants to buy 2K? Who wants to buy your plants versus zombies? Those things are generally the things that because they are so valuable. Hey, I'll take plants versus zombies. I'll take I'll take Madden.

10:13Robb Dunewood: I'll take these. And I think you will see ultimately in 2027 and further on, you'll see a breakup of this company.

10:20Tom Merritt: Yeah, I wouldn't be shocked. I mean, you've laid out a pretty compelling case and it feels like it's the kind of case you might see on a presentation in a boardroom at EA when they're discussing all this sort of thing. It all tracks for me. Obviously, it's not going to happen until after the deal closes. So they have to close the deal, then they have to make the changes. So we're talking, you know, maybe five years from now before this sort of thing happens. But I hadn't even thought about just how much trouble Microsoft had to go through to get Activision Blizzard. And so Sony's like, well, we're not going to go through that trouble for EA, but a little less trouble for a little smaller bite.

11:01Tom Merritt: Sure. Yeah. They'll take Madden or something. Right. Yeah. That makes sense to me.

11:05Robb Dunewood: You could even see a company like Sony say, I'll take this now and then come back a year later. You know what? That's still there. We'll take that now, too, because that gets them around the regulatory issues because this is private equity. So they could do it slowly over time.

11:19Tom Merritt: I could even see an Apple, which discussed this, but I was like, yeah, I just never saw Apple wanting to run EA, but take a franchise or two, you know, and roll it into Apple Arcade. Yeah, maybe. Maybe Plants vs. Zombies could go to Apple if they could get that studio, you know, and mobile games and all that.

11:37Robb Dunewood: Apple is definitely one of the companies that could afford it. DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to Jim Hart, Mike Aikens, Norm Fazekas, and our new patron, Bruno, and a raise from Mr. Evans and Dean.

11:52Tom Merritt: Wow, fantastic. Thank you. Welcome, Bruno. Everybody welcome, Bruno.

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15:08Robb Dunewood: There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Microsoft is launching an agent mode for Excel and Word that can generate spreadsheets and documents based on a user prompt. Using OpenAI's GPT-5 model, Microsoft is also adding an Office agent outside of Office apps and Copilot chat, powered by Anthropics models that can create PowerPoint presentations and Word documents. In its announcement of these tools, Microsoft said, quote, Today we're bringing Vibe working to Microsoft 365 Copilot with agent mode in Office apps and Office agent and Copilot chat, end quote. New tools are available in the Frontier program for Microsoft 365 co-pilot customers or Microsoft 365 personal and family subscribers.

15:48Robb Dunewood: The Excel and Word agent modes are only available on the web at launch, but will come to desktops soon.

15:55Tom Merritt: Everybody's just focusing on the use of the word vibe working, you know, and if you don't know, vibe coding is the phrase for just using these models to create the code so that then you can just put it together and maybe refine it. but it's just the vibes of what you want instead of having to hammer out the code. I don't, I mean, I get why they say it because it brings across the image of like, oh, I could just tell it to make the presentation I want or the spreadsheet I want, which is what it'll do. I don't know that it has the same vibe for lack of a better word that vibe coding does.

16:33Robb Dunewood: I am not surprised that they used the word, but I wouldn't have been shocked if they wouldn't have used it because my gut tells me is that Vibe has about another three to six months before people can't say it. So, so Mike said, let's, let's go ahead and use it now. We're making the announcement now. Let's use it before all of the goodwill that is in Vibe coding is, is, is eaten up because as we move further and further and further along, Vibe coding is not as great as we thought it once was going to be.

17:01Tom Merritt: Also, Microsoft put out an accuracy rate from Spreadsheet Bench of 57.2 % for its agent mode in Excel compared to human accuracy of 71.3%. So, I mean, that's not horrible. Certainly, if I had a really complex spreadsheet, that'll save me some time. But this is not something I would just rely on to do all my work or you're going to get work slogged.

17:27Robb Dunewood: You'll still have to have the folks who are just absolute geniuses in PowerPivot to go check what the AI did to make sure that it's actually right. Might be easier just to have those guys do it in the first place.

17:40Tom Merritt: Some cases, some cases. Well, and speaking, you know, PowerPivot and pivot tables, all that stuff. This could do that for people who can't do it. And if you were looking at the results and saying, oh, no, those results are the same, you probably have a very good chance that it is doing it right. but you can never totally rest assured yet.

17:59Robb Dunewood: Being someone who has used Excel for the bulk of my professional career and having been quite good at using PowerPivot and things like that and exporting data into databases and all that kind of stuff that you can do with Excel. If anyone told me that they created a PowerPivot and they didn't know what PowerPivot was before they created the PowerPivot, I would not trust the data. I simply just didn't.

18:20Tom Merritt: Yeah, yeah. There's a lot that goes on in there that can look right for a while and then maybe not be right. OpenAI officially introduced its parental controls in ChatGPT on Monday. Everybody's been talking about this for a few weeks and OpenAI kind of telegraphed that this was coming. It's now there. Parents can set quiet hours, turn off memory, turn off voice mode, turn off image generation, opt out of model training. Of course, you have to have the teen on a teen account to do this, but that's true of everything, right? Right. Teen accounts also get a reduced possibility of having graphic content or extreme beauty ideals and a system to recognize potential self-harm.

19:02Tom Merritt: Speaking of, OpenAI is also testing its new safety system for all users, which on a per-message basis routes emotionally sensitive conversations to GPT-5 thinking, which is better equipped to offer what OpenAI calls safe completion of answers to sensitive questions. So instead of just saying too sensitive, I'm not going to answer it, it's trained to provide what it considers to be a safe off ramp to lowering the temperature on those sorts of situations and avoiding unusual, but in some cases, fatal situations. You can argue whether someone was going to take their own life anyway, but there are certainly associations that have happened in the past.

19:42Tom Merritt: OpenAI expanded. It's a$4 a month chat GPT Go plan as well. So that was available in India. It is now available in Indonesia. It basically has limited deep research and no video generation or codex agent. Where do you want to start on this one, Rob?

19:58Robb Dunewood: So I think that OpenAI and companies like OpenAI have done the proverbial stick your finger in your mouth, put it up in the air and see which way the wind is blowing. And they have come to the determination that we better do something about parental control and about making sure that we are trying to make our software as safe for younger users as we possibly can before the government just comes in and does it in the worst possible way ever. So I think that this is OpenAI and, as I said, other companies as well just trying to get in front of this. So I don't think this is going to be the end of what we've heard about parental controls in these type of tools.

20:35Robb Dunewood: I think that everyone is going to get on board with this just because they want to do it in their way as compared to being told, here's how you must do it.

20:43Tom Merritt: Yeah, I try to remember that these tools have only been around for a couple of years. And so we are learning as we go where the pitfalls are, what the things are that we need to repair. I'll give OpenAI, you know, a C grade on responding to that. I don't know that they're always as proactive as they could be, but they have been pretty good at providing actual solutions in response. And I think this is an example of that. These are good parental controls. What's going to happen next, in my opinion, is that people are going to say, OK, but teens can get around this. We're already we we're seeing this with Meta now.

21:23Tom Merritt: what, 20 years after social media launched, where they're finally getting around to like, but you need to stop teens from having accounts. I think that's going to come faster for open AI, where someone's going to say, well, you need to start detecting when a teen is trying to get around these rules. And obviously, like you said, they're going to keep refining these parental controls and learning which ones work and all that sort of thing. The learning curve, I think, is steeper on safe conversations. I don't think anybody really knows what that is. they're doing their best to study it and see what's effective.

21:56Tom Merritt: But these tools are too new for this to be bulletproof. So somebody, you know, is going to fall afoul of this and people are going to point fingers and say you didn't do enough and then they're going to have to refine it.

22:08Robb Dunewood: Yeah, Tom, a point that I've heard you make on multiple occasions about this type of thing, that the goal is not to block all underage users from ever using the platform in any way that they're not supposed to, is to make it significantly difficult enough so that most of them just won't try to get around it. So are they gonna get perfect compliance? No, they're not going to get that. But will it be better than it was before they implemented this? I think the answer is absolutely yes. So once again, OpenAI and other companies like it, they're putting these things in place because it's a good thing to do and they will get relegated and may even still get relegated or get regulations levied against them if they don't do this.

22:47Robb Dunewood: So I think they're just trying to get as far ahead of it as they possibly can for what they know is coming down the pipe. Yeah.

22:53Tom Merritt: If you're a parent and you have a teen that you want to use ChatGPT, I'd be curious what you think of these parental controls yourself. Let us know feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com.

23:04Robb Dunewood: U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman ruled Friday that the U.S. Department of Defense was justified in adding DJI to a list of companies that contribute to the Chinese military industrial base. This prohibits federal agencies from using DJI products. Judge Freeman wrote, quote, whether or not DJI's policies prohibit military use is irrelevant. That does not change the fact that DJI's technology has both substantial theoretical and actual military applications, end quote. This is separate from a request passed by the U.S. Congress, which gives DJI until December to convince a national security agency that it does not pose an unacceptable risk in the national security of the United States or face a ban on its sale in the U.S.

23:45Tom Merritt: Yeah, that's the bigger deal. DJI needs to convince the United States government that it doesn't pose a risk. That feels like a trick question to me. It feels like something that probably is going to be or is being used as leverage with trade negotiations with China. They can sort of decide that it's convinced them at any point that they want to. I think DJI was hoping to make their case by winning this particular court case about the DOD list, but they didn't. And so they're still on the clock and the burden of proof is on them to prove they're not a national security risk. And the reporting on this will get more revealing as we get closer to December and as we may hear about a China trade deal before then.

24:38Tom Merritt: So I wouldn't give up the idea that you can buy DJI stuff. As for the ruling itself from Judge Friedman, DJI said, well, you could make that argument about any product made in China. And I think Judge Friedman might go, yes, that's true. And the DOD would then be justified in putting whatever it wants on this list. But it put you on the list, and that's what I was asked to rule on. So that's how Judge Friedman ruled.

25:00Robb Dunewood: I went for my morning walk this morning, and I saw Christmas lights, not Halloween lights, but actual red and green Christmas lights out. My gut tells me that folks are going to be buying a lot of DJI stuff for the holiday season right fast. I just I just think that's going to happen because it's uncertain. We don't know what is going to happen. And these drones are awesome. I mean, they are just they're cool. You can't even really call them toys because they can be used as tools. And that's that's part of the problem here. But we don't know what's going to happen. This did not go their way. I think these things are probably going to fly off of shelves and out of warehouses.

25:38Robb Dunewood: here in the not too distant future.

25:40Tom Merritt: I see what you did there. Last week, Qualcomm showed a reference laptop running its Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip beating Apple Silicon. As expected, benchmarkers have been checking those claims and now note that the Apple M4 Max beats the X2 Elite Extreme by 9.5 % on a single thread Cinebench 2024 test and 2.8 % multi-thread. Now that's enough to give Apple the bragging rights, don't get me wrong, But that's still a big improvement for Qualcomm, putting it arguably on par or close enough to par that if you like buying a laptop that runs Windows and has Qualcomm, you're not going to be giving up all that much.

26:21Tom Merritt: Meanwhile, Tom's Hardware found that Apple's new A19 chips, those are the ones in the new iPhone 17 line, are the fastest CPUs available. A19 and A19 Pro were almost on par with each other, according to Passmark. Now, of course, speed is not everything, and the chips don't perform as well on multi-thread benchmarks as they do on single-thread. But still, both A19 and A19 Pro on single-thread beat actively cooled chips like Intel's Core Ultra 9 258K, AMD's Epic 4585PX, and even beat Apple's own M3 Ultra in these benchmarks. So you're getting some impressive chips in those phones.

26:59Robb Dunewood: These chips are what we would call fast, fast. They're lightning fast. And as you said, the difference now is that, yes, Apple is still faster, but it's on par. It's not like you can use that as a chip. Look how much faster our chips are because it's not that big of a deal. And there's enough places where the other chips are actually a little faster than Apple. You can say, well, let's hold on there. Are you sure you're faster? So, yeah, probably across the board, probably a little bit, but not enough to matter.

27:29Tom Merritt: Yeah. Yeah, speed isn't everything in the desktop chips. So it starts to come down to use cases, which is what, that's the conversation Qualcomm wants to be having. It's not, we're so far behind, but what are you using it for? We're better at this. Maybe Apple's better at that. But man, I still think the phone pass mark chips, even though it's just speed, that's impressive in a phone, for sure.

27:48Robb Dunewood: To say that, just to be able to say, it's the fastest chip ever. That is still pretty cool.

27:55Tom Merritt: It's pretty, yeah, it's pretty nice bragging rights, even if it's just bragging rights.

28:00Robb Dunewood: Wired reports that Akshaya Kumar, Anna Raymaker, and Michael Spector of Georgia Institute of Technology discovered that Tile's tracking tags broadcast an unencrypted static MAC address alongside his rotating ID. This could be used by a malicious actor to rebroadcast the information to make it appear as if the tag is near someone. In other words, they could frame the Tile owner to look as if they're stalking someone. Security researchers reported the findings to Tile in November, but Tile stopped talking to them in February.

28:30Tom Merritt: Yeah, and Tile just told Wired, we've made security improvements. They didn't comment on this specifically. Not having them encrypted, I think, is the biggest problem here. Broadcasting the MAC address isn't great, but if it was encrypted, maybe not as big of a deal. Certainly not as big of a deal as it being unencrypted. Also, this report said the rotating IDs were predictable. so they were able to guess what they would be, which is very bad. That's horrible. Yeah. Horrible. So, and if you didn't quite understand the vulnerability here, basically what I could do is if I have monitored Rob's tile tracker, I can predict the rotating ID and his MAC address isn't going to change.

29:13Tom Merritt: I can then take that information and I can go over to Roger Chang and broadcast Rob's tile tracker info to make Roger's devices think that Rob's tile is near him. And then Roger could then accuse Rob of, you know, trying to stalk him or track him or something like that. Not that Rob would ever do that. But, you know, that's the kind of thing that the Georgia Institute of Technology folks were surmising could happen if this wasn't a patch. So kind of ball in tile's court, right? Yeah, hopefully, we don't know

29:50Robb Dunewood: because they're not talking, they're not talking about hopefully Tiled has fixed this absolutely to where this is not going to be a problem because this is a big deal. When you, when you start thinking about stalkers and the stuff that they can do, it doesn't sound like it would be terribly difficult to make it look like somebody is someplace where they actually are not. And that, that is very, very problematic.

30:07Tom Merritt: Yeah. And then, and, you know, just as a comparison, I don't know about Google's tags. I didn't see it referenced here and I didn't look it up, but Apple AirTags don't broadcast the Mac address because you don't need to. And they encrypt the rotating ID. And presumably the rotating ID is not easy to guess, but even so it's encrypted. So those are a more secure implementation. All right, let's finish up with a few quick headlines that are just good to know if you want to understand the news in the future.

30:37Robb Dunewood: China's DeepSeek updated the DeepSeek v3.1 EXP platform as an intermediate step toward its next generation model and cut prices of its software tools.

30:48Tom Merritt: Snapchat is putting a five gigabyte limit on its memories storage feature, but they'll sell you memories storage plans starting at$1.99 a month if you need more storage.

30:59Robb Dunewood: This could be the biggest story of the day right here, Tom. Google is rolling out the gradient version of its G logo, which it's been using in search to all its products.

31:08Tom Merritt: Oh no, the logo. So Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says his sources indicate Apple is nearing mass production of, some of these are not surprising, the next MacBook Airs, the next MacBook Pros, and two new monitors. That one might be a little more intriguing. All of those are expected to launch either by the end of this year or Q1 2026.

31:28Robb Dunewood: Reuters sources say ByteDance will maintain ownership of TikTok's U.S. business operations like e-commerce and advertising, while the new U.S.-owned company will handle the app's data, content, and algorithm maintenance.

31:40Tom Merritt: We sort of alluded to that when we talked about it last week, but Reuters had some firmer stuff that, like, ByteDance isn't going to go away. You're still going to go to Santa Monica, TikTok, ByteDance to buy your ads and all that stuff if this deal happens, which we still got a lot of time before that happens. What do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at reddit.com slash r slash daily tech news show.

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33:22Robb Dunewood: We end every episode of DT &S with some shared wisdom. them today. David and Arturo have some thoughts on this weekend's special episodes.

33:29Tom Merritt: Yeah, on Saturday, Jen Kutter and I did a month in review. That's something we're trying out. Might do it every month. And then on Sunday, I had a great conversation with Dr. Jerry Tolbert about Tylenol. Just very nuts and bolts. Here's what we actually know and here's what we don't without getting political. Arturo wrote, I've been in Japan for the month and the monthly recap was particularly well-timed for me. I've been able to listen to some of the weekly Daily Tech headline recaps, and they're somewhat useful to me too, but on weekends, I have less time to listen alone. So this monthly one especially hit the spot.

34:04Tom Merritt: And then David wrote, just listened to The Truth About Tylenol. It was brilliant. I went into it apprehensive, hoping it wasn't going to be political and wondering how it fit into the DTNS remit. All my fears were allayed. Dr. Jerry Tolbert brought clear-headed facts to the table, helping me understand the situation better. Did it truly fit into the DTNS wheelhouse? I'm not completely convinced that it did, but when it's this good, I'm happy to welcome it in. And the same goes for the episodes with Dr. Nicky too. Please keep up the good work.

34:35Robb Dunewood: Those are some nice comments. Folks like the stuff that we're doing at different times, whether it be during the week or on the weekends.

34:43Tom Merritt: Yeah, we got really good comments about the Tylenol episode, which I too thought Dr. Jerry Tolbert was fantastic with. And we got positive response to the month in review from people saying, oh, this was great. I feel like I don't have to go back and listen to every episode. I can just, yeah, I'm caught up now and I can start over, which was kind of the idea there too. So heartening to hear that. And I figured we'd read these in case people were like, oh yeah, I haven't got to those episodes now. You've got a better idea of what you're looking at.

35:10Robb Dunewood: Well, folks, we want to know what you're thinking about. So if you've got some insight into a story, share it with us at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com.

35:18Tom Merritt: Yeah, big thanks to David and Arturo for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business. Just become a patron. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Talk to you soon.

35:40Robb Dunewood: The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand.

35:45Tom Merritt: Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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