"Only film viewers in the audience are let in on the mysterious, dramatic meaning of Rosebud after Thompson leaves, moving off with other reporters. The camera now shows the incredible accumulation of Kane's acquisitions over a lifetime. The camera slowly glides over years and years of his pitiless pieces of material goods, looking like a broken jigsaw puzzle, a deserted skyscraper city, or a metropolis when photographed from high above. [Steven Spielberg memorialized this shot in his ending to Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), when the crated Ark of the Covenant is stored in another vast warehouse.] There in the piles of possessions are: iron bedframes, an open, wooden toybox (with a few dolls and a picture of Kane around the time of his first marriage), a pile of old newspapers wrapped in twine, a photograph of Kane as a boy with his mother, and a snow sled (that is picked up by a workman). Kane's life appears as a disjointed collection of failed energy to productively use resources.

In the basement beneath Xanadu, workers clear away the vast array of junk and articles. A workman is sorting and crating his possessions near an incinerator, a blazing furnace where items are thrown that are considered junk. The worker with the sled in his hands is told by Raymond, the butler, to toss it into the flames of the incinerator to be consumed, along with an accumulation of other possessions. The words are the final ones uttered in the film:

Throw that junk.

The sled is an enduring and beautiful symbol of Kane's life. The name "Rosebud" (and its decorative, painted blooming flower) is briefly seen on the sled in a close-up before the bonfire's heat warps and blisters the paint and it is consumed by the flames. The two sleds in the film significantly exemplify different aspects of Kane's life:

Rosebud: decoratively-painted, placid, pretty, from nature, innocent (from his childhood home and a reminder of his mother)
Crusader: metallic, strident, cold and heartless, crusading (received from Thatcher when Kane was taken from his home to be a ward of the impersonal banking interest)
[Does this answer the film's fundamental question? Or is it just another piece of the gigantic puzzle of his life?]

The "Rosebud" sled is a memento from Kane's childhood with his mother, a childhood that was interrupted and abandoned by the opportunities wealth and fortune bestowed upon him. When he glimpsed the snow crystal paperweight on his deathbed, Kane might have imagined the house in the globe was Mrs. Kane's boarding house, and had a fleeting, dim memory of the sled that he loved there. The sled symbolized the innocence, beauty, and love that he lost, the love that eluded him - a dying man's memory of a childhood possession that held special meaning for him.

He also might have remembered his first meeting with Susan where he first saw the globe - she was the one true love in his life (in the words of the El Rancho nightclub waiter: "Why, 'til he died, she'd just as soon talk about Mr. Kane as about anybody"). She wasn't impressed by his wealth - and they experienced a loving relationship until his tyrannical demands led her to abandon him. She left to prove that she could act independently of him (in her own words: "I can't do this to you? Oh, yes I can"). He died an old man, friendless, loveless, but wealthy and able to buy Susan's love, but not truly invested in her. His power and wealth were unable to halt his decline - his crusade to be a trust-busting champion of the people faltered amidst storehouses of wealth and opulence."