Bloomberg Talks
Brookfield Asset Management CEO Bruce Flatt Talks Succession, AI and Strategy
04 Feb 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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News. One of the giants of deal-making is Brookfield, and its CEO, Bruce Flatt, is an industry titan in his very own right. This morning, the company announced that Flatt will be stepping down from his post leading the company's $1 trillion asset management business. He, of course, will stay on as the chair and as well as CEO of the parent company.
I'm pleased to say that Bruce Flatt joins us now for the big picture, an elevated look at the strategies and trends shaping corporate action. Bruce, thank you so much for joining. We're so thrilled to have you as our inaugural guest.
Thanks. Thank you for having me as your first customer.
I was going to say, there's no one else we'd want to kick things off with. And what a way to kick things off with this announcement that you're handing, at least for the asset management business, the reins over to Connor Teske. I have to say, in a lot of your industry, not only are there issues with succession plannings, rarely do they lay out such a clear path. Why do this and why now?
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Bruce Flatt's succession announcement?
There is this moment right now, we've heard from other financial services companies like Goldman, that growth is going to be slowing in talent hiring because of things like AI. Do you see the same thing ahead?
You know, I don't know. Maybe we're different because we're backbone real asset investors and we've never had a better time. We keep raising more money. We keep deploying it. We're in good returns. Things are great. And the business is accelerating. So and even our credit, it's asset backed finance credit. It's not what you see in the news today. And therefore, our business keeps growing.
We keep adding people. We keep adding countries. We keep adding clients. It's pretty good. But we're always focused. Talent, people, especially in a business like ours, but especially in every business, people's everything. And it's really, really important to focus on it. It's the easiest thing to forget about. And one should never forget about your people.
So at the same time, you mentioned it, just the real asset business that you have and this really big bet on AI infrastructure that's been evolving at Brookfield. Everything from mega deals with the hyperscalers to creating your own cloud company. There's a lot of really interesting work you're doing.
If I could borrow a phrase and kind of bastardize it from Alphabet Sundar Pichai, what is the risk right now? Is it under or over investing?
So if you're in the real asset space in the private markets, It's very difficult to entitle land. It's very difficult to get power. It's very difficult to build, because you can't get people to build. And therefore, the investment is tough to do. And that's why the returns in it are excellent, because people need skills to be able to do it. What most people focus on is the public markets.
There's a few securities which everyone wants to own, and therefore multiples go higher. But in the private markets, it's very different. And there is an underinvestment in what's going on in private markets because everyone's looking for additional AI cloud capacity, and it's very tough to build. Easy sites have been built. or committed, the hard sites, now the hard work starts.
And in particular, we need power. And as you know, we have a huge power business. And that's the bottleneck in artificial intelligence for the next 10 years.
I definitely want to talk with that because you've been doing some really interesting stuff there. But I do wonder, just on the public market side of things, Again, the fear is less about the infrastructure. It's more these hyperscalers are spending so much and maybe they don't have the revenue to back it up. And maybe that trickles down into infrastructure.
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Chapter 3: How does Bruce Flatt view his evolving role at Brookfield?
And this is super critical because it's baseload capacity and it's very, very important to the United States.
A lot of your infrastructure is really important to the United States. Have you had talks with the U.S. government in other aspects about striking war partnerships?
You know, look, I would say they're very commercial in what they do. where it makes sense and where business entrepreneurs can put money to work, they're very supportive. And they were very good with us and we're going to build out, we're going to recreate an industry and create enormous number of jobs in America because of what they did.
Have you felt any more friction because of your Canadian roots or your cross-border type of business? There had been this fear, and we saw it very present at Davos, that it's a more insular United States and maybe foreign powers. And Mark Carney's speech, who I know you know very well, talks about the need of the middling nations to come together. Do you feel that flow through?
Yeah, so... Sixty percent of our assets are in the United States. We're headquartered in the U.S. We have a huge business here. This is super, super United States, super, super critical to us, as is every country. Remember, what we do is we build local infrastructure in countries and we sell goods and services to individuals or companies. That's it.
we don't move over the borders we just build out and sell in the country so what we pick countries very wisely we go to them and we build out in those countries so we're friends with every country in the world and uh... and we try to be great Citizens. We try to do well for the country.
We always try to be on the side of doing the right thing for the country, never get cross-thread with any, and build out infrastructure in the country. And what we're doing is, as you noted, super important. for the backbone of the global economy. That's all we do. We either lend to or we put equity into the backbone of the global economy.
And that's what these countries need, including the United States.
I heard from someone that this administration, someone said this recently to me, is just like much more willing to pick up the phone. It's much more willing to listen. Is it just much easier? to get things done in this country right now?
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