He was an Objectivist. His ideology was basically that when you take a contract for work, you do the work. Once you get paid, the contract is over. You don't get to claim future rights on work-for-hire jobs, because part of the original contract was that the person you were working for would own the work. Over the years, he actually threw a lot of shit at artists or writers who pushed for creators' rights and royalty agreements in comics, because he saw them as parasites.
There are stories about people who visited him at his home, and noticed that he had original pages and panels from early Spider-Man comics that Marvel had returned to him, and he used them as cutting boards because he considered them useless garbage. When people told him he should sell them, he wouldn't. Supposedly, he was annoyed that Marvel gave them back to him in the first place, because as far as he was concerned, they owned them and they were no longer his responsibility.
For all that people tend to shit on Objectivists, he was one of the ones who really walked the walk as well as talked the talk, and didn't just use it as an excuse to be selfish or self-centered. Even in cases where his attitude was actively detrimental to himself.
That's just really stupid then. The original creator is always far more important than the company. ---