[jsprogrammer]

>The media is saying Elon was just beat at his own game.

The media is not a single, conscious entity. Some Gizmodo blog may have claimed as such, but I think you'll have a very hard time producing any other person who would claim that what a Gizmodo blog says is what the entire media is saying.

>Elon tweeted to point out that it's a horrible comparison

Not really. There are comparables: stick goes up, stick goes down without crashing.

Elon only appears to have made a non-sequitor argument (unless someone shows where the media made the claim that space and orbit were the same thing).

Ultimately, this is probably a defect of Twitter's character limit. It is extremely difficult to put a fully reasoned argument into a single tweet.

[mikeash]

> There are comparables: stick goes up, stick goes down without crashing.

SpaceX did that years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_(rocket)