Saudi Arabia Takes Over EA & Scientists Create The First Allergy-Proof Dog

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Neal Freyman** (0:28)
Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neal Freyman.

**Toby Howell** (0:32)
And I'm Toby Howell.

**Neal Freyman** (0:33)
Today, would you bring your parent to a job interview?

**Toby Howell** (0:36)
Then, Saudi Arabia is officially the new owner of EA.
It's Thursday, August 6th. Let's ride.

**Neal Freyman** (0:51)
We've all watched football games where your team's coach draws up a stinker of a play, and you think to yourself, gosh, I could do better than that. Well, you might just have your shot. In a viral promotion, the Akron Zips College Football Team announced it'll randomly select one fan, any season ticket holder, to call the team's first drive in its season opener on September 12th. It's been a massive success. The initial post drew more than 16 million views in the first 24 hours, which has translated to a ticket sales bonanza.
Akron sold out its sweet inventory for the first time in history and already beat its ticket sales targets weeks before the season begins. Toby, genius idea. I would absolutely go three and out.

**Toby Howell** (1:34)
Let's get only go one of two ways. One is the three and out way.
Awful play calls and we forget all about this. Or two, the person leads a touchdown drive, gets offered a full-time coaching job and we get the offensive coordinator version of Rudy. I hope we get the second one. And it got me thinking too, should we run a similar promo, Neal? If you buy tickets to our next event, then you'll be entered for a chance to win the opportunity to say, let's ride. I actually don't want that because I feel like there's better let's rides out there. Not a bad idea for everyone other than the 4 AM wake up.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:08)
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**Toby Howell** (2:38)
Saudi Arabia has been trying to buy up global influence via sports for decades now. Now it's moving on to sports in video games. A consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, completed its takeover of the video game developer Electronic Arts yesterday, valuing the company at $55 billion for what is officially the largest leveraged buyout in history. The investment firm led by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner also participated in the deal. The maker of iconic games like Madden, The Sims, Battlefield, and the franchise formerly known as FIFA, now embarks on life as a private company, a life that comes along with a lot of debt. The deal is being financed with a $20 billion loan from JP Morgan, which puts the leveraged in largest leverage buyout ever. All that debt now hits EA's balance sheet, which in a list fear could lead to a much more conservative strategy going forward. When you have IOUs that large, there is usually less willingness to take a risk on a new game or IP, which means Madden 36 and Battlefield 15 Here we come. We've seen a lot of video game mergers and deals over the last few years, which have not aged well. Specifically Microsoft's $68 billion deal for Activision Blizzard has curdled in hindsight, but the Saudis are making a bet that EA still has the juice. Neal, EA Sports. It's in Riyadh.

**Neal Freyman** (3:55)
It's not just EA Sports in Riyadh. It's the entire video game world. So far, the Public Investment Fund has invested about $30 billion into video games. They own the publisher of Pokemon Go. They own the publisher of Monopoly Go. They own stakes in Nintendo, Take-Two Interactive, some of the biggest video game publishers, and now they're taking all of EA. I mean, they have an entire city devoted to gaming and e-sports. It's called the Kadia e-sports and gaming district. It has four different gaming arenas. They want 10 million visitors a year by the end of this decade to visit their e-sports city. So this is a kingdom. This is an MBS ruler who is all in on video games.