Richard Charles Blum (July 31, 1935 – February 27, 2022) was an American investor and the husband of United States Senator Dianne Feinstein.

[15] Blum was the founder and chairman of the American Himalayan Foundation[16] and was Honorary Consul to Mongolia and Nepal.

The talk was sponsored by his American Himalayan Foundation and the Blum Center for Developing Economies at Berkeley.

He contributed $15 million toward the establishment of the center, which addresses extreme poverty and disease in the developing world.

[31] In the arts and culture, he made grants to the Creative Visions Foundation, the Daniel Pearl Foundation, San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.

[35] Blum and Feinstein were also criticized for having a 75% stake in Tutor Perini, a building contractor which received military contracts for projects in Iraq and Afghanistan during the U.S. occupation of those countries.

[36][37] In 2008, during the sub-prime mortgage crisis, Feinstein contacted the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation with a proposal to fund the FDIC's foreclosed-property dealings through the US government's general budget.

Not long afterward, Blum's real estate firm, CB Richard Ellis, won a lucrative contract with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to sell foreclosed properties.

[38] In 2020, Blum was discovered to have written letters on behalf of unqualified applicants to various UC campus chancellors.