Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire founder and chairman of Las Vegas Sands Corp., said the man he fired almost five years ago as the head of his casinos in Macau was a “very strange man” who almost detroyed the company.

Adelson, 81, testified Tuesday for the first time in open court about his conflict with Steven Jacobs, who was fired in 2010 as chief executive officer of Sands China Ltd. and who has accused his former boss of requiring him to do “outrageous” and “illegal” things, including collecting compromising information on Macau government officials.
“I didn’t trust anything that came out of Jacobs,” Adelson told a Las Vegas judge, adding that Jacobs’s wrongful-termination lawsuit has validated his distrust. “He tried to go behind my back and report to different members of the board so he wouldn’t have to report to me.”

Adelson, under questioning from James Pisanelli, one of Jacobs’s lawyers, said he should have fired Jacobs sooner because he “tried to kill the company” by unilaterally deciding to cut out the junket operators who control the supply of high-end gamblers that account for 60 to 70 percent of the gaming revenue in the former Portuguese colony.