The general consensus is that publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst is the primary inspiration behind Charles Foster Kane.
Later news media figures including Sumner Murray Redstone, Rupert Murdoch,[1] Ted Turner,[2] and Elon Musk have been compared to Kane.
We are given an overview of his public career in the pastiche News on the March newsreel, with some parts then shown in more detail through the flashback recollections of those who knew him.
[a] A supposedly worthless mine given to his mother in 1868—to settle a bill for room and board by Fred Graves — is discovered to be rich in gold, making the family suddenly fabulously wealthy.
He takes up full-time residence in the newspaper office (the sitting editor resigning in protest) and in the first edition publishes a "declaration of principles" stating his duty to be truthful to his readers and to campaign on behalf of the poor and underprivileged.
His best friend Jedediah Leland - the Inquirer's drama critic - asks to keep the text of the declaration, feeling it might one day be an important document.
To Thatcher's fury, Kane campaigns against slum landlords, "copper robbers" and "traction trusts" (monopoly control of railways) - including companies in which he himself is a major shareholder.
To finance the fledgling Inquirer, Kane uses his personal resources, reasoning that this would allow him to operate it, even at a million-dollar annual loss, for 60 years.
Kane, whose party affiliation is never explicitly specified, is shown to be a supporter of Theodore Roosevelt, joining him on a whistle stop train tour.
Their marital problems reach the point that they are barely on speaking terms, with Kane ignoring Emily as she reads the rival Chronicle newspaper at breakfast.
As his popularity increases, Kane, who regards himself and is widely seen as a future President, runs as a "fighting liberal" for Governor of New York in 1916, against corrupt boss James "Jim" W. Gettys.
After Susan attempts suicide, Kane releases her from her disastrous operatic career and spends most of his time at Xanadu, his gigantic Gothic chateau, full of objets d'art which he has acquired over the decades, and built on an artificial mountain on his vast estate in Florida.
By 1925 Kane is being denounced as a "communist" by the aged Thatcher to a congressional committee, and in the same month as an enemy of the working man and a "fascist" by a speaker at a public rally in Union Square, Manhattan.
The business downturns of the Great Depression—as well as Kane's excessive spending habits on the crumbling and unfinished Xanadu—forces him to downsize his media empire.
[g] Susan is unable to stand the monotonous routine inside the cavernous mansion and Kane's increasingly domineering nature, and eventually leaves him.
He returns from an aeroplane trip to Europe in 1935, declaring that he has met with the leaders of "England, France, Germany and Italy" and that "there will be no war".
The Minneapolis Record Herald praises him as the "Sponsor of Democracy", the Detroit Star as "Leader of [the] News World" and a "Man of Destiny", but the El Paso Journal accuses him of having "Instigated War for Profit".
The viewer sees that the word "Rosebud" was written on the sled Kane's parents gave him as a young boy, and left behind at his mother's boarding house when he was sent away to live with Thatcher.
It is implied earlier in the film that Kane found the sled in a warehouse, where he had been looking over his late mother's possessions, around the time he first met Susan.
In a scene in the newsreel in 1925, Thatcher, described as the "grand old man of Wall Street", tells a congressional investigation that Kane is a Communist.
The mansion contains Kane's vast collection of classical sculptures and art, and the newsreel states that portions of Xanadu were taken from other famous palaces overseas.