As someone who has worked for a company that fulfilled contracts and subcontracts coming all the way from ESA and as someone who currently works for a state-owned business, I can totally stand behind parents statement on how ESA is nowhere near the mark of being able to compete with SpaceX. ESA is an expensively run agency, and whatever they make, with balooned budgets and suboptimal implementation if for nothing else but necessary/ingrained bureaucracy eating at every euro, will be a more expensive and less reliably version of SpaceX's offerings.

I am not American but SpaceX has cut its way into its own niche, for exactly the reasons outlined above in parent's comment -- they simply work through a very effective model getting from vision to final product, which is cheaper than the entire competition and works just as well (at least it is insurable, as is everything else boosted to orbit these days, I gather).

ESA has probably poured more money into producing these renderings of their space launch vehicle and everything associated with whatever paperware phase this project of theirs is at, than it would cost SpaceX to do a preflight check for a Falcon launch. And that's government-funded for you. I work for one, I'd know. Little of what we make is original, but unfortunately what we copy, we copy badly and more importantly, expensively. I cringe thinking about the cogwheels at ESA that have to turn and for how long so that ESA has a vehicle like they advertise.

Unless they actually license or otherwise procure the technology from SpaceX, which is the only hope I think. ESA isn't even in the business of launch vehicles, doing this from ground up with their engineers is going to drag them through the same growing pains SpaceX went through, all the way back to when they had to fix bolts to their dummy Falcon rockets from some island in Hawaii, with engineers being flown in from mainland and sleeping in hammocks on 12 hour shifts.