Kristy Hinze

EXCLUSIVE: The model and the billionaire: She’s 27. He’s 63. Kristy Hinze, the supermodel face of Sportscraft and granddaughter of the late Queensland minister, Russ Hinze, reveals how she fell in love with thrice-married IT billionaire Jim Clark, the man credited with inventing the Internet.

Supermodel Kristy Hinze’s unlikely romance with Jim Clark, a computer billionaire twice her age, may have raised eyebrows, but the gorgeous and spirited Queenslander is having the time of her life, she tells Lee Tulloch in the April issue of The Weekly.

About two-and-a-half years ago, Australian supermodel Kristy Hinze was having a drink with a female friend in New York’s swank Cipriani restaurant when the women decided to invite a mutual acquaintance, who was going through an unhappy divorce, to join them. If the purpose of the invitation was to cheer him up, it succeeded very well. Ever since that night, Kristy has been virtually inseparable from Jim Clark, the self-made Texan billionaire, who is the acknowledged father of computer graphics and the creator of Netscape, the web browser which made surfing the Internet possible.

“We had a couple of glasses of wine and hit it off,” Kristy reminisces. “We organised a dinner for the following night. And then he said, ‘My boat’s down in the Caribbean, why don’t we get a fun group of people together?’ So we all went down and had a great time, and it just developed.”

When the story broke that Jim Clark’s Australian “honey” was Kristy Hinze, there was the usual cynicism about a thrice-married billionaire hooking up with a gorgeous, younger model (he’s 63 and she’s 27). His divorce from third wife Nancy had cost him a $133 million settlement and had been all over the newspapers.

Also, Jim was no ordinary billionaire. The subject of a recent book, The New New Thing by Michael Lewis, he is an undoubted genius who has redefined American culture, from the high-tech movies of Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas, to the way we get our information and do our shopping.