This paper examines a board's decision to hire a star CEO and analyzes the consequences of this decision for firm performance. We propose a new methodology to identify star CEOs by analyzing the texts contained in 18,240 Wall Street Journal news articles. Unlike previous measures, our new metric accounts for the time series variations of executives’ visibility as well as how favorably these executives are portrayed in the business press. The proposed measure indicates that boards with short industry tenure or busy boards are more likely to select a star CEO. Consistent with previous evidence, firms that hire star CEOs perform subsequently worse than firms that hire non-star CEOs. However, in contrast to previous work, we show that this underperformance is attributable to boards with short industry tenure or busy boards, rather than the inabilities of star CEOs. Furthermore, our event studies of stock market reactions to hiring news imply that investors prefer star CEOs selected by boards with long industry tenure. Our work contributes to the literature by offering insights into how board composition affects firm performance.