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Brookfield Asset Management runs giant investment funds that buy and own things like office towers, power plants, and pipelines on behalf of pension funds and other big investors.
Brookfield Asset Management is in the business of owning big, boring, expensive things that other people need. It raises money from pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, and wealthy individuals, then puts that money to work buying assets like office towers, renewable power plants, data centers, toll roads, and pipelines. The company itself is an asset manager, meaning it earns a fee for managing other people's money, and it also invests its own capital alongside its clients so everyone's interests are aligned.
Here is the key distinction: Brookfield doesn't just pick stocks. It buys entire businesses and physical infrastructure, often with borrowed money, and holds them for years while improving them. The bulk of its earnings come from steady management fees charged on the roughly one trillion dollars of assets it oversees, plus performance fees when its funds hit return targets. It has four main engines: real estate, infrastructure, renewable power, and private equity, each with its own team of specialists. A pension fund in Ontario or a sovereign fund in the Middle East might hand Brookfield billions of dollars because building a team to buy and run a port or a solar farm is hard, and Brookfield has done it for over a century. The business is deeply tied to interest rates. When money is cheap, Brookfield can borrow heavily to buy assets and earn attractive returns. When rates rise sharply, as they did in 2022 and 2023, the value of existing assets can fall, fundraising slows, and clients get nervous. Brookfield's scale is its advantage — few competitors can write a single multi-billion-dollar check for a portfolio of wind farms or a chain of data centers. Competitors include Blackstone in real estate and private equity, KKR in infrastructure and buyouts, and Apollo Global Management in credit and private markets. Its own shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange, and it pays a modest dividend while retaining most cash to reinvest.
In 1899, a group of Canadian investors brought the first electric streetcars to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and built a company around them: the São Paulo Tramway, Light & Power Co. That business set the pattern the company would follow for over a century — own long-life assets that provide services people cannot do without.
In 1954, Peter Bronfman took money from selling shares in the family liquor business, Seagram, and started an investment company. A decade later it turned toward real assets — the physical stuff of the economy — laying the foundation for a global investing approach.
In 2001, Brookfield launched its first private equity fund, Brookfield Capital Partners I, and began transforming itself into a global alternative asset manager. More funds followed for infrastructure, real estate, and later the energy transition — pools of investor money managed for a fee.
In 2002, Bruce Flatt became CEO. He would supervise the company's transformation into a broad asset manager overseeing more than a trillion dollars across real estate, infrastructure, renewables, private equity, insurance and credit. The scale of that number is the point: this was no longer a small investment firm.
In 2005, the company shed its old conglomerate name, Brascan, and became Brookfield Asset Management, ticker BAM. The new name matched a new focus on real estate, power generation and funds management — nearly all the old conglomerate holdings had been sold off.
In 2019, Brookfield bought about 61% of Oaktree Capital's business for $2.4 billion in cash and shares. Oaktree brought roughly $110 billion of fee-bearing capital and helped push Brookfield into the top ranks of alternative asset managers — and it opened a door into insurance.
In 2022, Brookfield listed its alternative asset management business as a pure-play, asset-lite manager with a focused management team. The parent was renamed Brookfield Corporation, and shareholders got one new BAM share for every four BN shares they owned. The idea: let investors own the fee-earning manager on its own.
In 2025, BAM completed a corporate arrangement with Brookfield Corporation, which handed over its roughly 73% interest in the asset manager to BAM in exchange for newly issued Class A shares. After the arrangement, BAM stood as an alternative asset manager headquartered in New York and listed on the NYSE and TSX under the symbol BAM.
In 2025, BAM and its parent agreed to a roughly $3 billion deal to buy the remaining quarter of Oaktree it did not already own. That same year BAM posted a record fundraising year, raising $112 billion, while closing final rounds above targets for its real estate and global transition flagship funds.
In 2026, Connor Teskey, age 38, took over as CEO; he had joined BAM in 2012 and became president in 2022. Bruce Flatt stayed on as CEO of Brookfield Corp., the majority owner. Teskey's view: the bottleneck to AI growth today is electricity supply, and BAM's energy investments are a key differentiator.
One thing that makes Brookfield unusual is how much of its own money sits inside its funds. The parent company and its employees have tens of billions of dollars co-invested, which means when a fund does well, Brookfield does well beyond just the fee. That structure is designed to reassure clients that the manager eats its own cooking. The company was spun out from Brookfield Corporation in late 2022, separating the fee-earning asset manager from the parent's direct holdings. Since then, it has been pushing hard into data centers and the electricity needed to power artificial intelligence, betting that the AI boom will require enormous amounts of new infrastructure — and that Brookfield will be one of the few firms big enough to fund it.
Saved answer · last researched 27 Oct 2026