Most executives I know who travel are meeting with a bunch of customers if they're going that far. By and large, the idea that "OMG I'm losing 4 hours of billable time" isn't very broadly applicable--if, indeed, it ever was.
That is because they don't bill by the hour, The billable hour is a simple model to visualize the opportunity cost.
People at this level[1] want to get things done quickly, if they can pay to avoid loosing a half a week for couple of meetings traveling back and forth, they won't hesitate to.
[1] Any level really, but executives can both afford to and get a return on this kind of expense
My point is that if you're going to spend the time to travel to another continent, a few hours on each end don't really matter much. There's a good chance they'll be at their destination for a the better part of a week. That's been my experience when I've traveled with execs.
Personally I'll probably take a more comfortable trip over an incrementally faster trip. But that's just me of course. (Unless it possibly avoids a red-eye.) Business-class trans-Pacific is a bit boring but it's not really that painful.
(As I wrote elsewhere, my dad also used to prefer routinely flying first class in a 747 vs. taking the Concorde.) Comfort isn't just about speed.
People do that because it takes 15 hours to travel. 100 years before people will go visit say family for few weeks or even months because travel was slow, now we fly for thanksgiving and back at work the following week. Travel behavior changes depending on the mode of transport and cost of it.
> incrementally faster trip
it is not incremental, we are not shaving couple of hours, it is radically faster trip, 15hr -> 1 hr is a huge difference.
> prefer routinely flying first class in a 747 vs. taking the Concorde
Concorde was quite popular for that one route though, that was not enough to save it.
The challenge then was not there were not other economically viable routes - there were, it was just that nobody was allowing supersonic flight over land, for example San Fransisco -> New York route would have been very successful.
With 2.5 hour on a Concorde a flight you can work (i.e. do meetings) in both cities (esp NY->SF) on the same day. It is a 5 hour flight now you can really work in one city the day you are traveling.
> People do that because it takes 15 hours to travel
...and those annoying time zones and the resulting jet lag*
If we could magically get from Europe to Australia in 5 minutes, I doubt that that many people would use that as an excuse to go to Australia for a shorter time.
* I've visited Australia three separate times in the last ~15 years, all three trips were very short due to external constraints, my longest stay so far was for one night
People billing thousands of dollars an hour are not opening a laptop traveling or not, they have enough executive assistants for that.