Whales - manipulators are trying to influence the price of Bitcoin. But this is not easy, since the coin is decentralized and has a large capitalization.
At present, we can assume that such whales - manipulators are spot ETFs - funds on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a decentralized currency but most of the trading volume and liquidity happens on centralized exchanges. So it cannot be said that it is not manipulated because it is decentralized, whales manipulate the price of Bitcoin to make profit but they do not manipulate the Bitcoin network.
Bitcoin's capitalization is 3 times larger than ETH and hundreds of times larger than other altcoins, but compared to assets like gold or stock companies, it is nothing. Manipulating it may seem difficult to us, but for institutions, whales who manage hundreds of billions of dollars, it is not so difficult. Also Bitcoin is very sensitive to news and they can manipulate it with news, it doesn't necessarily take a lot of money to manipulate.