Rosebud Meaning In Citizen Kane Film

The best explanation has been given by Orsen Wells, here amplified further by @Mike Restivo. Charles Foster Kane gradually changed from the innocence of youth to public social advocate to successful business owner while developing a gluttonous power hunger and control lust. 

He acquired indifferently things and people’s sentiment both in politics and newspaper readership subscription.

Magnificent collection of things and creatures of both land and sea were evidence of his drive for possessions only as a symptom of an insatiable drive to acquire things that would never abandon him, argue with him and with which he could control according to dictates of his wishes. 

It was suggested in the film that “Rosebud” may have represented something that Kane did not, if not, could not collect.

When Kane’s fashion editor and best friend wrote an unflattering article to be published, Kane fired him, not for the article itself, which Kane himself published unedited, but because Kane did not sufficiently control him and subsequently severed the friendship. 

When his last wife was leaving him due to irreconcilable differences, instead of protesting something like “But I love you!” Kane demands “You can’t do this to me!”

Rosebud was the name of the sled Kane had as a child and usually represents the innocence of youth.

Viewers learn of Kane only though narrative of others and their slightly varying viewpoints. 

When Kane utters “Rosebud” with his dying breath, alone with none in attendance but a nurse after he expires, viewers wonder if he received a deathbed lucidity and thereby renounced his materialism and control fetishes for innocence and unconditional love.

It may equally apply as a final self-imposed damnation of a man who demanded to collect and control his past, his youth, anything, in an ultimately ineffectual act: 

In death, it is not Kane’s’ collections, his immense castle Xanadu, and the control he influenced through his newspaper chain and personal relationships friend and familial, but rather it is Kane himself who would leave all his possessions and relinquish all control, even as he vainly tries to repossess his youth and remake it after his will.