As someone who flies coach everywhere, I’d do the same if I had the means to do so. A long flight in coach is extremely draining even if you’re time-focussed, you’ve got to take recovery time into consideration.

If you value that over speed, why not take a oceanic cruiser? More lounges, more service, you can stretch your legs way more (or take a swim), better meals (and more of them)..

Its always a tradeoff of comfort vs speed.

It's not as much of a tradeoff as you think. I've been on cruises and would rather be first class on Emirates or Qatar Airways than on a cruise.

The internet tells me that there is only one ocean liner left (Queen Mary 2), which travels only between the UK and the US east coast.

There's only one left because there is no demand for that kind of travel, which is good evidence that people value time over comfort.

There's certainly demand for low-cost ocean voyages as vacations, with over 300 cruise ships in service (and cruise lines generally quite profitable).

It's high-cost, non-vacation, long distance travel/transport where ocean liners were beaten in the 1960s by airliners (and airlines, in contrast, are generally not very profitable).

Still, that solitary transatlantic liner carries more people across the Atlantic in a typical week than Concorde did when it operated scheduled services on that route, and not because the other Concordes were busy elsewhere...

In any case, the lack of senior business executives choosing seven day trips in plush private cabins as their preferred mode of transatlantic crossing isn't much of an indication of whether people in that price bracket will tend to prefer pay more to spend four hours in discomfort rather than eight hours mostly asleep.

She's the only one in service right now, but looks to also currently depart from Australia, the Emirates, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Africa.

The Queen Mary 2 (at least pre-pandemic) did a combination of transatlantic liner routes and cruises depending upon the time of the year.