Rick's website has been around since, what, the late 90s?
He was supposedly fired in the early 2000s, which led to his involvement with AVENUE Q.
His recent comments said that Steve had a tendancy to throw younger, newer, or secondary performers under the bus, and also seems to view Steve's firing as karma.
Could it be that sometime between, maybe, 1997/1998 and 2001/2002 or so, Steve ended up doing something that cost Rick his job at Sesame?