Im genuinely confused about something. If EA selling themselves would put them

Let's put on our business hats for a moment to understand what's actually going on here. What you're missing is who is doing the buying and who is doing the selling. The buyer and the seller are not the same people! The company is changing ownership. The old owners are no longer in the picture. It is the new owners who decide the direction, orders. and choices for the company.

The sellers here are actually all of the current shareholders (partial owners) of Electronic Arts. Once the buyout goes through, every share of EA gets exchanged for $210 cash provided by the buyers. Shareholders cannot opt out of this exchange, the deal is binding. One the deal goes through, the former shareholders are no longer financially associated with EA at all. They become outside observers. This includes the majority of the old board and the C-suite of executives. Remember what happened to Bobby Kotick after Microsoft bought Activision-Blizzard? He stuck around for a period to help with the transition and then exited stage left. We should expect the same of executives like Andrew Wilson after the deal goes through.

The buyers are a consortium (i.e. a group) of private investors including the Saudi Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake Technology Management (an investment firm), and Affinity Partners (a Private Equity fund). This group is pooling around $35 billion of their own money plus taking out additional loans of $20 billion to buy all of the outstanding shares of EA stock at $210 per share from each and every shareholder. After this buyout goes through, they will own every share of EA stock, making them the sole owners of the entire company.

However, rather than the individual investors taking the loan out themselves, they instead have the newly reformed Electronic Arts corporation take the loan out to pay for itself. This helps spread the risk out a bit - if the new EA goes bankrupt, the buyers (PIF, Silver Lake, Affinity, etc.) will have lost the $35 billion they put in to buy EA but they won't have to pay for the additional $20 billion in debt - the company will take that debt with it to the grave. However, this also comes with the liability - the interest on the loan must be paid or some form of "restructuring" will ensue and the lenders are the first ones in line to get paid out.

The new owners believe that they can make EA a stronger and better performing company long term - a company that will be able to make them money while also continuing to pay off its much larger debts. These buyers are confident enough in the long term results to bet $35 billion of their own money and willing to add an additional $20 billion in debt to the new company while they're doing it. Only time will tell if that bet will pay off.

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