Is Elon Right? Reusable Rockets with higher gravity (edited)

a while back Elon said the following we live on a planet with a deep gravity well and a thick atmosphere this makes full reusability extremely difficult If gravity were 10% lower it would be easy and if it were 10% higher it would be impossible that's a very interesting statement and I'm curious about whether it's correct to figure that out we'll need to answer two questions the first is how would increased gravity affect Rockets and the second is whether that effect is bigger for reusable Rockets to answer these questions and to see if Elon is correct we need to dig into the physics this will get complicated for a minute or two and then it will get simpler this part will not be on the test the energy required to get into a 400 km orbit about where the space orbits is determined by a number of we need to get up from the Earth's surface to orbital altitude and we can express that using this equation and we then need to get up to orbital velocity and we can figure out the energy cost using this equation then we need to deal with the losses we waste energy Fighting Gravity to get into orbit and we waste energy fighting against drag and there are two equations to estimate that we add all these up and we get a very precise answer that's wrong it's wrong because treating the altitude and velocity as separate quantities assumes that Rockets and then turn sideways they don't do this because it's less efficient the robust way to come up with the true energy cost is with a simulation that calculates all of these values on the Fly that's a lot of work an and different rocket architectures fly different trajectories to minimum their losses I'm not that ambitious so I' so I'm going to make what is often known as a simplifying assumption