Comment by psadauskas

A "free market" is one in which all the participants of the market have perfect information and act completely rationally. This is, of course, an academic ideal, similar to solving a physics problem that tells you to ignore friction.

What we have here is a "capitalist market", where those with more power (capital) within the market leverage it to exploit the other participants. Private Equity uses their money to extract as much money as possible from a segment of the market, usually destroying it in the process. But for a beautiful moment in time they created a lot of value for shareholders!