Benefit
Bluelighter
Kane's motivations are, arguably, very clear. He is one of the wealthiest and most powerful men on Earth, a capitalist titan who can impose his will on other men and society at large. He wants to control foreign policy, the media, the working class, his friends, and his lovers. In the beginning, when he is young, he does this, ruling his kingdom with total power cloaked in idealism. But, in fact, he is not truly an idealist. He defends the working class not out of an altruistic desire to improve social conditions, but to safeguard his own interests by earning the good will of the people. In the 1920s and 1930s, with the rise of organized labor, Kane begins to lose some of that control.
Ultimately, he loses control over everything, even his second wife, the poor working class girl who he ushered into the world of elite society. If he was going to rule over any one person completely, it would have been her. But he cannot form her into the singer he envisions and she eventually rejects him. His friends also reject him, as does the public at large. He pursues his vision all the way to his own destruction. Like Jay Gatsby, Charles Foster Kane is consumed by a perversion of the American Dream. He has too much power, too much wealth, and it ruins him.
The brilliance of the screenplay is that this progression is never explictly broken down. The screenplay defies rigid notions of character development. Kane goes from youthful idealist to grumpy old curmudgeon; but it's not so simple. He's a little bit of both at all times plus a lot of other things, and Orson Welles' superb acting really delves the complexity of the character and brings him to life without the need for clumsy exposition.
This can hardly be considered a flaw. All movies require some willing suspension of disbelief. But in any event, it was the butler who reported those were his last words and the movie does not state whether the butler was in the room or not.
