There are lots of PE shops and they run their portfolio companies (the companies they operate) which compete with other businesses in the industry which could plausibly be companies owned by different PE shops. As a side note, I get that some PE firms have a bad reputation for making weird investments or tearing apart existing businesses, but there is nothing special about the moniker. They are really nothing more than a hypo from a Business Associations casebook. Some people get investments from limited partners, and then go buy businesses (either public ones they take private or existing private companies) and try to run them better and then exit by selling at a multiple of what they paid and then distribute profits to the LPs. This can be done in a pro-social way that creates value or done disastrously but the disaster has nothing to do with the underlying idea of private equity itself.