It’s a wonderfully pithy line; but I think he may actually be falling for a sort of optical illusion:
For any given tech level, you have the ability to spend money in order to obtain time(whether by hiring lackeys to do stuff for you, owning a horse, not dying young of preventable diseases, taking a helicopter to work because the highway is crowded; innumerable variations based on local conditions and available technology); but the cost of each additional attempt at time saving tends to rise as you exhaust the low hanging fruit. You end up needing more lackeys(and eventually you have enough of them that you need lackeys to manage your lackeys); the aerospace or biomedical engineering necessary gets a lot more costly if you move away from mature/mass market stuff, you run up against a nation state that takes a humorless position on airspace and won’t change it even for your lobbying budget, etc.
As with anything else that costs money, there tends to be a level where the real, high-quality, suffering can be out-spent(eg. human biology being what it is, if reliance on sucky public transit makes your commute so long that you can’t afford a family life or remotely adequate sleep, you are going to be miserable in ways that someone who experiences a bit of mere tedium will not); so while cost and time are the enemies of everyone, their relative scariness varies markedly with wealth.
What’s honestly sort of interesting about the demise-of-the-Concorde story isn’t that that pricey supersonic air travel was beaten down in the mass market by comparatively inexpensive and efficient subsonic aircraft; but that it was beaten down pretty much across the board.
Let’s say your attitude toward commercial airlines is “I don’t take public transportation”. OK, so you get yourself a nice spiffy Gulfstream. Lo and behold: “Cruising speed: Mach 0.8-Mach 0.85, Maximum Speed Mach 0.88”(unless you spring for the G650 or wait for the G600 to reach production, in which case your maximum speed get a slight bump to Mach 0.925; but with ‘normal’ cruise at 0.90 and ‘long range’ still at the same 0.85). You’ll obviously have more legroom; and won’t have to fight for overhead compartment space with the unwashed; but your in-air speed will still be almost identical to the Mach 0.85 cruising, 0.89 max, that contemporary commercial airliners are doing.
It isn’t just that the Concorde isn’t in service; it’s that (outside of military applications and the surplus gear you can sometimes pick up from them, if you fancy that hobby) not even private jet money will get you a supersonic passenger flight.
