Brian Heywood pulled his hedge fund business out of California in 2010, fed up with that state’s high taxes and increasingly liberal politics.
Hunting for a new home — preferably in a state with no income tax — he moved Taiyo Pacific Partners and dozens of employees to Kirkland and laid down $4.4 million for a 40-acre spread on a former dairy farm in Redmond.
In his adopted state, Heywood for years kept a relatively low profile. He donated to Republican candidates and causes but focused largely on raising three kids while managing Taiyo’s multibillion-dollar portfolio of investments in Japanese companies.
As of 2024, that’s all changed. This year, Heywood may be the most consequential figure in Washington politics.
Think Tim Eyman with a gigantic bank account.
Pouring more than $6 million of his money into a paid signature-gathering campaign, Heywood has almost single-handedly bankrolled six initiatives that are likely headed to the November ballot.
The unprecedented initiative slate would eliminate the state’s new capital gains tax, repeal a landmark climate law, allow people to opt out of a long-term care payroll tax and reverse police-pursuit restrictions passed in recent years by the Legislature. They’d also ban local and state income taxes and guarantee parents access to information on K-12 school curricula and school medical records.
All six initiatives have been certified as having received the required signatures to make the 2024 ballot. The final one, targeting the state’s long-term care payroll tax, was certified on Friday by the Secretary of State’s Office.
If approved by voters, the proposals would deal a stinging rebuke to majority Democrats and Gov. Jay Inslee as he winds down his third and final term, while wiping out billions of dollars in taxes devoted to education, clean energy and transportation projects, health care and other government services.
Heywood says he was motivated to act because no one else was stepping forward to effectively challenge taxes and policies pushed through by the state’s dominant Democratic leaders.
“I don’t crave — I don’t need my name to be in the spotlight,” Heywood said in a recent interview at his Redmond ranch. “My intent was to fix stupid things. That’s why I did this.”
As both a frontman and main financier of the measures, Heywood has emerged as a hero for Republicans demoralized from years of losing elections and being largely shut out of political and policymaking power.
His initiative campaign, Let’s Go Washington, is closely allied with the state Republican Party, whose chair, state Rep. Jim Walsh, R-Aberdeen, filed and officially sponsored the six initiatives and appears alongside Heywood at publicity events.
For Democrats and their allies, Heywood is supplanting Eyman, the state’s longtime anti-tax initiative sponsor, as a top villain.
Liberal groups, including SEIU 775, the politically influential home health care worker union, launched a belated but aggressive effort to stymie Heywood’s petition drive. They set up a “hotline” to report signature gatherers and allegedly tried to intimidate or pay some gatherers to leave the state — an effort that sparked controversy and threats of a lawsuit from Heywood.
“He’s the sheriff of Nottingham”
Activists have splashed Heywood’s face on an online “Wall of Shame” for his efforts to repeal the new capital gains tax, which is levied narrowly on investment profits by the state’s wealthiest residents.
“He’s the ringleader of a small group of a bunch of ultra-wealthy people who want to buy tax cuts. In his own mind he might be Robin Hood, but in practice he’s the sheriff of Nottingham,” said Aaron Ostrom, executive director of the progressive group Fuse Washington.
Heywood is vehemently critical of the capital gains tax and what he argues is the “sneaky, backhanded way” the Legislature enacted it. But he said he’s not in this fight out of a selfish desire to lower his tax bill. (He says he didn’t owe anything under the tax in its first year.)
“I’m spending way more money than I’ll ever save on taxes,” Heywood said of his initiative drive.
Heywood, 57, who grew up in a Mormon family in Arizona, now lives on a big ranch-style property in the Sammamish Valley, where he runs a horse-boarding business, bales hay, grows apples for cider and makes honey.
In a nod to his libertarian leanings, Heywood registered the ranch with the state as “Galt Valley Ranch LLC” after John Galt, a character in Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged,” which promotes the virtues of unrestrained capitalism.
In between his political and hedge fund work, Heywood zips around his property on a Kawasaki Mule, tending to horses, including six of his own, and using a tractor front loader to scoop and flip a giant pile of manure under a shelter, where it composts and gets spread around as fertilizer.
He jokingly refers to the manure pile as his “legislative session.”
The ranch has become a gathering place for King County Republican political events. Last year, he hosted a “Summer Freedom Fest” that drew more than a thousand attendees, including GOP gubernatorial candidates Dave Reichert and Semi Bird.
According to Republican insiders, Heywood has mulled someday running for governor himself. “We’ll see. We’ll see,” he said when asked about his plans.
“We talked about the realities of going from zero to governor. We offered him another way to get involved,” said Cary Condotta, a former Republican state legislator and former chair of the Chelan County Republican Party, who has worked closely with Heywood on the initiatives through his political organization, Restore Washington.
In 2022, Heywood and Condotta, along with other conservatives, tried to run 11 similar initiatives on a volunteer basis but failed to get any qualified.
They regrouped last year and pared the list down to six — and Heywood opened his checkbook. He formed a petition gathering firm, dubbed TDM Strategies (for “That Damn Mormon”) and also paid out-of-state vendors millions to land the required signatures.
“These guys blew past the finish line. I am in awe of what they’ve done,” said Eyman, who has been derailed as the state’s foremost anti-tax initiative sponsor after getting hit with millions of dollars in fines for campaign finance violations.
Heywood’s crusade against the capital gains tax alarms its supporters, who point to Washington’s sales-tax-reliant tax code, which hits poorer residents hardest.
Sharon Chen, a former Microsoft program manager who paid the capital gains tax last year, said it’s a step toward fixing the state’s “upside down” tax structure. “I am interested in living in a place that has clean air, clean water, investments in public spaces,” she said. “All these great things government does, you should pay for it.”
The new tax raised nearly $900 million in its first year, from fewer than 4,000 taxpayers — with much of the money earmarked by law for early learning and child care subsidies.
Holly Lindsey, who runs a home-based child care center in Longview, said she fears the consequences if the tax gets repealed. Already, she’s seen parents struggle to afford child care copays of as little as $90 while grocery bills and other costs have risen.
“I think it’s sad that he is going after the children and the people who are most vulnerable. Those are the people who are going to be affected,” said Lindsey, who has run a child care center for 28 years and serves as a trustee of SEIU 925.
Heywood and other capital gains tax opponents reject the notion that Washington is hard up for cash to fund public services. They point to state tax revenue, which climbed to more than $65 billion last year, up from about $34 billion a decade ago.
“Some poor redneck
Mormon kid”
Meanwhile, Heywood says the state’s 2021 Climate Commitment Act, which charges companies for greenhouse gas emissions, has helped drive up prices for gasoline and other necessities for everyday people.
“I grew up poor. This would have screwed my family. In my head, I’m thinking of that guy who lives up in Everett and commutes down to Bellevue. Holy crap! For the mom, the mom who’s running her kids all over the place,” he said.
Supporters of the climate act, including Inslee, blame gas price spikes on oil company profiteering and have tried to remind voters of the aim of the law — to transition away from climate-warming fossil fuels. In its first year, the climate act’s pollution permit auctions have brought in $1.8 billion, money intended for emission-lowering programs including clean energy projects, public transit and help for Washingtonians to buy heat pumps and electric cars.
Heywood was raised in rural Arizona. His father worked at a power plant and later started a video rental business. Neither his father nor mother graduated from college, but Heywood got accepted to Harvard.
“Once every year or once every 10 years, they get some poor redneck Mormon kid from Arizona as part of their quota system,” he said.
It was at Harvard in the mid-1980s that Heywood says he became solidly conservative — repulsed by the spectacle of liberal student demonstrations he saw around him.
“They would occupy the Harvard Yard, and they created a bunch of shanty towns. Part of it was the apartheid thing,” he said, referring to demonstrations urging the university to divest from investments in South Africa over that country’s racist segregation policies. “Anything that could be protested, they would occupy the Yard.”
Heywood started out studying to be an expert on the Soviet Union. That changed when he accepted a traditional Mormon mission assignment in 1986 and was sent to Japan. “I probably knocked on 80,000 doors, which is a lot of rejections,” he says.
The immersion led Heywood to shift his focus. After returning to Harvard, he graduated with a degree in East Asia Studies. He got married and started a career as a consultant with J.D. Power and Associates.
In 2001, Heywood founded Taiyo, his hedge fund, which managed large investments including hundreds of millions from California’s public worker pension fund. Taiyo operated as a “friendly activist fund” he said, taking big stakes in Japanese companies and working with management to improve profits.
For example, Taiyo bought into Roland, the manufacturer of popular musical synthesizers, amplifiers and guitar effect pedals, taking the company private. Heywood still serves on the Roland board.
“If we have a shot,
and I think we do ...”
By 2010, Heywood said he was looking for a new home for the hedge fund out of Monterey, Calif. The decision was in part due to frustration with taxes — “we were paying about a 67% marginal rate,” he said — but also due to issues with employee recruitment.
He said the firm looked at Los Angeles and San Francisco but both had higher taxes. Then they looked at states with no income tax like Tennessee, New Hampshire and Florida. But with a need to travel frequently to Japan, and many Taiyo employees from there, the distance didn’t make sense.
So Washington became home.
The same year Taiyo arrived, an initiative to create a state income tax on the wealthiest residents was put on the ballot, bankrolled by unions and some wealthy progressives.
“That scared me,” Heywood recalled.
But, as they previously had, voters overwhelmingly rejected the tax, with 64% voting no.
Two years ago, Heywood sold his stake in Taiyo to the heirs of Nintendo for a price he won’t disclose. They asked him to stay on as CEO to manage the company, a job that takes him around the world. Last week he was in Kuwait. He and his wife own a home in Kamakura, Japan, where they had two historical farmhouses disassembled and reassembled on their property.
Heywood has become a reliable political donor for local and national Republicans, though nothing approaches his outlay for the six initiatives.
Over the past two years, Heywood has donated more than $460,000 to the state Republican Party, with tens of thousands more directed to several county GOP organizations.
On the federal level, his largest donations came in 2012 when he gave $50,000 in support of Mitt Romney’s campaign for president and $30,800 to the Republican National Committee. He was a delegate to the Republican National Convention that year in Tampa, Florida.
He donated $6,600 to the 2024 presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Two years earlier, he donated to a PAC affiliated with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who is running for president.
Heywood has not been a supporter of Donald Trump. He said he’d like to see someone else carry the Republican banner for president.
But Heywood said he’s become “sympathetic” toward Trump over the array of criminal indictments he’s facing.
“If every attorney general that’s in a blue state can file unlimited charges against him — and so many of them are bogus — any average person is dead in the water, and that’s a really scary thing to me,” he said.
Condotta, of the Chelan County Republican Party, said the initiative effort is giving hope to conservatives and others unhappy with the direction of the state. In keeping with national political sorting trends, Washington has seen some Republicans move to states more aligned with their politics.
“If we have a shot, and I think we do, that could change,” Condotta said. “Otherwise, I think you better get another lane built on I-90 going east.”
