Nobody can force him what to do. If he was at all confident in his coin's technology he wouldn't bow down to such whales. Especially the types of whales involved. No whale should be able to dictate the decisions the dev team make. It's the reason why they pulled out of Blocknet.
Technically they could force his hand. If they don't like the direction the dev is going or the decisions he makes, they could threaten to dump his coin into oblivion. And with that coin having the negative stigmata associated with it, and not a whole lot of NEW investors coming in, that could completely ruin a good project. If the dump is huge, it could never recover, and the project is lost. All that dev's hard work is down the shitter. For an anonymous dev, they could just create a new coin, but if the dev is known, that negativity will always follow.