It’s difficult to understand the way the Classic Roll supercharges multiple senses at once—unless you have eaten one. The plastic knife cuts through an outside that’s mildly crusty before giving way to a softer middle. Frosting melts into the ridges of the bun, which sits in a brown puddle of excess. Take a bite and the buttery flavor bathes the edges of the tongue as the gritty sweetness of sugar and cinnamon washes over the tip. The texture is lighter than expected. The sensation of pure sugar can be overwhelming. It coats the mouth and clogs the back of the throat. Halfway through the roll, the body cries out for water or, even better, Diet Coke, which has a way of cutting through the varnish laid by the fats and sugars. Deep inside the roll, the bun’s core is hot and yet just barely cooked. Once gone, the bottom of the clamshell box is left smeared like a crime scene with a mash of syrup and cream cheese. Each one is 3 inches high and 4 inches in diameter and costs $3.69. ... The company is not run by Satan. It’s run by Kat Cole, 35, whose last job was at Hooters.

Byron Trott has long been a trusted advisor to clients with names like Buffett, Walton, and Pritzker. Now the ultra-discreet financier is raising his profile by investing alongside them. ... “Not a lot usually shakes me, but I was scared to death when I walked in,” says Trott, who prepared for the meeting by reading all of Berkshire Hathaway’s annual reports. The two hit it off, and the get-to-know-each-other session, scheduled for an hour, ran to three. Before it was over, Trott had a fee-generating assignment from Buffett, who is notoriously stingy about paying investment bankers. “I did what I do with most clients for the first time,” says Trott. “I say, ‘Give me your toughest problem. What have you not been able to accomplish?’ ” ... “Let us understand you, your company, your long-term objectives, and let us help you by being a true solutions-based adviser on your side of the table, not the kind of idea-of-the-day, dialing-for-dollars banker,” he says, summarizing his approach. ... What sets Trott apart, along with his unique clientele, is his ability to sit on every side of the table. By stressing discretion, confidentiality, and patience, Trott and his colleagues repeatedly do what few other bankers can: They advise multiple parties to the same transaction—and then invest capital in some of the deals they’ve just brokered. In this fashion BDT has raised two funds, worth $8 billion, in five years and acquired stakes in companies that include Tory Burch, Peet’s Coffee, and the Pilot Flying J truck stop business. The capital comes largely from BDT’s own employees and the families in its network, who essentially are providing patient investment dollars to one another.

Brendan Kennedy and Michael Blue, private-equity financiers, settled into a downtown Seattle conference room in March to meet with a start-up. Both wore charcoal blazers and polished loafers. Kennedy, 41, is the former chief operating officer of SVB Analytics, an offshoot of Silicon Valley Bank. Blue, 35, learned his trade at the investment-banking firm de Visscher & Co. in Greenwich, Conn. Two years ago they quit comfortable posts to form Privateer Holdings, a firm that operates on the Kohlberg Kravis Roberts model: they buy companies using other people’s money and try to increase their value. What sets them apart is the industry in which they invest. Privateer Holdings is the first private-equity firm to openly risk capital in the world of weed. Or as the Privateer partners prefer to call it, “the cannabis space.”

Ferro, who declined to be interviewed for this story, began his career as an entrepreneur, launching companies in the 1980s and ’90s, including a software startup. By the time he met Fiasco, Ferro had long since transitioned from creating businesses to buying them—especially ones in financial trouble. And for an investor in distressed companies, few industries have targets as numerous and tempting as newspapers. ... The Ferro era at Tribune has quickly become one of the more baffling chapters in media history. Within eight months, Team Ferro has rejected one purchase offer, angering shareholders; promised to unveil a “content monetization engine” that would unleash newspapers’ true potential as a “rock star business”; posted a want ad for an employee to assist “news content harvesting robots”; rejected another, more lucrative purchase offer; rebranded Tribune as Tronc, or tronc, as the company insists; and split and re-rebranded tronc into troncM, for media, and troncX, for exchange. ... corporate renaming ignited extended spasms of #tronc mockery on social media. Sample tweet: “WHAT YOU GONNA DO WITH ALL THAT JONC ALL THAT JONC INSIDE YOUR TRONC.” ... yet, until recently, Ferro was on the verge of laughing all the way to the bonc, as it were. ... now the spotlight is back on Ferro and his vision for saving journalism.

They settled on three investment categories: transportation, energy, and water/waste. Global Infrastructure Partners, founded in May 2006, now manages about $40 billion in assets ranging from ports and pipelines to London’s Gatwick Airport, a liquefied petroleum gas storage facility in Visakhapatnam, India, and a vast wind farm in the North Sea. Over 10 years, GIP has expanded its roster of backers to include some of the world’s biggest sovereign funds and a slate of U.S. pensions. The firm operates three funds. GIP I raised $5.7 billion in 2008. GIP II closed in 2012 with $8.3 billion. In January it announced its latest and largest pool, a $15.8 billion fund, the largest-ever dedicated to infrastructure. ... Fixing deteriorating infrastructure, combined with new projects in the U.S. and in emerging and frontier economies across Asia and Africa, has given rise to a market that Bain & Co. estimated is worth $4 trillion. As many governments face budget shortfalls that curb such spending, private money is stepping in. ... The two recovering engineers marveled at how you could theoretically use a lot of the industrial processes they’d learned at GE to retool an airport. “An airport is ultimately about moving planes, passengers, and bags through a series of steps,” Woodburn says. “That’s a familiar process to people with experience in manufacturing.”

The performing powerhouse, founded in 1984 in Quebec, now encompasses 10 “resident” shows in the U.S. and Mexico, including O, and eight traveling productions, which tour to 130 cities around the world. Even as traditional circuses continued a long decline—in January, after a run of 146 years, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus announced that it would soon shut down—a stunning 10 million people saw a Cirque show last year. Its extravagant productions are famed for their mixture of daredevil acrobatics and lowbrow clown comedy, pop hits and New Agey compositions, and daring design. (O, for example, takes place in and above a 1.5-million-gallon pool of water.) But lately Cirque has branched out in unprecedented and potentially lucrative ways: There are plans to launch a theme park and a kids’ entertainment project, and to design an interactive NFL store in New York’s Times Square. There are—of course—plans to go big in China. ... The year before the acquisition, Cirque reportedly brought in $845 million in revenue. (By comparison, all the shows on Broadway combined brought in $1.37 billion last season.) ... sees Cirque as a way to play a bigger, counterintuitive trend: a yearning for live entertainment in a digital era.

Founded in 2005, the Brooklyn-based online marketplace hosts 1.8 million small merchants who sell vintage and handmade goods and takes a cut of every transaction. Its sellers traffic in the one-off items usually found in antique stores and boutiques: pineapple-motif throw pillows, succulent-shaped jewelry, tote bags with birds on them. The fast-growing market is often mocked as a kind of twee EBay—TweeBay, if you will. But by early 2015 the company was selling close to $2 billion in merchandise a year and generating revenue of $196 million—figures that had more than doubled from two years earlier. ... Benefit corporations are structured so managers and board members have a legal obligation to worry about more than just their fiduciary duty to shareholders. A public-benefit corporation can get sued for wasting shareholder money just like a normal public company can, but it can also be sued for being a poor steward of the environment or for failing to pay a fair wage.