Connor Teskey

Connor Teskey is President and CEO of Brookfield Asset Management, the roughly $1 trillion alternative-asset manager, making him one of the youngest chief executives of a major asset manager. He joined Brookfield around 2011 from CIBC and rose quickly: after five years in the private-equity group in Toronto he moved to London in 2016 to help build the firm’s European renewable-power platform, then led Brookfield’s renewable-power and transition business — one of the largest and fastest-growing power-development platforms in the world — for its first years of scale before ascending to run the whole firm alongside chairman Bruce Flatt.

Brookfield raises capital from the world’s largest institutions and, increasingly, individual investors, and deploys it into the real assets that form the backbone of the global economy: infrastructure, renewable power and energy transition, real estate, private equity and — through Oaktree — credit. Teskey’s own trajectory tracks the firm’s pivot into the AI era, where the data-centre and power build-out is now its single largest and fastest-growing investment theme.

Core positions

Sell de-risked cash flows, not market bets. Brookfield will take construction, operating and development risk but engineers out market risk — locking CAPEX, off-take, construction and financing contracts simultaneously so a new asset’s return is insulated from moves in rates, power prices and inflation.

Underwrite the downside; the upside is free. Spend the bulk of any deal on the worst case. High-quality assets with strong downside protection deliver an attractive base case from things within your control, leaving asymmetric upside you did not have to pay for.

Overbuild is certain, but not random. In AI infrastructure as in every cycle there will be overbuild; the discipline is to build only against long-term contracts with the highest-credit-quality counterparties, in tier-one markets, never on spec.

Liquidity is chronically undervalued. It looks overpriced exactly when you don’t need it and priceless when you do, so keep excess capital for the unforeseen — the defensive covenant cushion and the offensive dry powder that let Brookfield deploy when others cannot.

In the wiki

• Connor Teskey on Brookfield, Infrastructure, and the Business of Real Assets — on Brookfield’s business model, engineering out market risk, the AI data-centre and power build-out, and capital allocation at scale (The Knowledge Project, March 2026)

See also

• Shane Parrish — host of the episode
• Value Investing — the downside-first, own-and-hold discipline Teskey applies to real assets
• Private Credit — the off-bank-balance-sheet lending underlying Brookfield’s credit and Oaktree franchise
• Nicolai Tangen on Managing $2 Trillion, AI Bubbles, and Contrarian Investing — a fellow steward of vast capital from the same show