I don’t think there is some secret cabal of whales that is holding meetings and deciding when to pump the price of Bitcoin and when to make it drop. Manipulation usually occurs at the small cap level, with newly launched pre-mined tokens. It is not necessarily whales manipulating the price, but sometimes it is developers working with social media influencers and minor celebrities.
Bitcoin is immune from these types of organized pump and dump campaigns, unless you believe the conspiracy theories about Tether printing fake money and creating artificial demand, but I have not seen any convincing evidence of this.
There is no financial market that is not subject to manipulation, including the stock market or the gold market. The smaller the market, the easier it is to manipulate, and with a market without many regulations and freedom, manipulation will take place more easily. Bitcoin's capitalization is only 1.5 trillion and the entire market has a capitalization of 2.4 trillion, which is smaller than the GDP of a country like Germany or smaller than a technology company like Apple. Compared to the gold market capitalization of 15 trillion and the stock market of more than 100 trillion, cryptocurrencies and bitcoin are nothing and still very small. So manipulation will be easier and more frequent.
Bitcoin is even very susceptible to manipulation by fake news spread on social networks, let alone that it will be immune to hidden forces from Wall Street.