I'm guessing the CEO is involved in technical development. Nowhere does any project management, roadmapping, customer interaction, new product development, customer outreach, etc appear in the tweet about her EA's responsibilities.
I did not read this as "I only work 40% of the week thanks to my EA", I read this as "A CEO can get inundated with the machinations of running a company, so much so that the vision and direction-making is lost". So, they outsourced the machinations to focus on vision and direction. That's _fine_. C-suite folks always have legions of assistants, just they are sometimes called Vice-somethings.
And separating "work that can be done by anyone with a little training" from "Work that can only be done by me or an expert" is a great thing to focus on for management. It allows a business to get the right people for the right things. This even has a name: Business Abstraction Layer (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-ab... ).
Yeah this kind of makes it sound like the EA should be running the company. The only work the CEO admits to actually doing when she's not taking cooking classes or surfing is "showing up and doing my thing" at pitch meetings.
I work at a company where EAs are assigned to multiple people. As in, John Doe is an EA for Alice, Bob, Carson, and Dave.
They do the basic EAs things: Check emails, schedule meetings, review finance reports, etc. I doubt it's anywhere close to what Christine's EA does, but the idea that you're juggling the tasks of multiple people sounds like insanity to me. I hope they're well-paid.
EAs are typically compensated fairly well. Over 100k is not uncommon. It is a very high skill job. But there is of course a huge range of opportunity and comp.
I ended up doing most of these things as a business development manager (in addition to some engineering work) at a small manufacturing company. Often I felt like an executive assistant. My first project was to take a drawer full of invoices and bills, sort them, and put them into accounting software. Sometimes I made copies for people. Other times I cleaned the bathrooms before important meetings with customers when they seemed too dirty.
When a company gets to a certain size (and it's probably smaller than you might think), I think you eventually want a smart person to keep the "knucklehead stuff" off of everyone else's desk. It has to be the kind of person that has an intuitive understanding of the technical side of how the company runs internally, how the external sales process works, and a willingness to do things that other people don't want to do.
Shameless plug: If you are looking for someone to do this in the New England area, drop me a note. I'm not available immediately though.
I also doubt the EA is making 60% of what the CEO makes.
Something about how our work is structured is really screwed up