The Toll Collector

While Wall Street Wasn’t Looking, Accountant Bruce Flatt Became a Billionaire by Assembling One of the World’s Largest Portfolios of Office Buildings, Power Plants and Infrastructure Projects—and Making Brookfield Asset Management the Safest Growth Stock on the Planet.

- Antoine Gara

Just off a 14-hour commercial flight from Dubai, Brookfield Asset Management chief Bruce Flatt stares into a gaping hole in the ground that looks like open-heart surgery performed on an entire city block in Manhattan. Piles of beams, mazes of scaffolding and even active railroad tracks crisscross each other endlessly.

“The amount of steel here is enormous,” Flatt shouts over a cacophony of honking car horns, grinding cement mixers and moving cranes at one end of the notoriously clogged Lincoln Tunnel. More than 17.2 million pounds of steel, to be precise, enough to anchor a 67-story glass office tower. Two more towers are also going up, along with a 30-floor boutique hotel and a 16-story trapezoidal glass office building with 26-foot high ceilings and floors the size of football fields—much of it suspended over railroad yards. Dubbed Manhattan West, this 7-million-square-foot, $5 billion project encompasses two square city blocks.

And yet it’s completely invisible in the public consciousness—the vast majority of New Yorkers have never heard of it. Most people assume it’s part of the adjacent Hudson Yards development, a $25 billion project from billionaire Stephen Ross and his Related Companies that will feature 16 skyscrapers and 18 million square feet.

That’s fitting. The high-profile Stephen Ross has an oceanfront Palm Beach mansion, owns the Miami Dolphins and travels in the same circles as Donald Trump. Bruce Flatt is an accountant from Manitoba who lives in a quiet Toronto neighborhood and often commutes by subway.