I would say most whales do have the projects success at heart, they also stand to lose the most if overall confidence in the project is damaged – that is the basic premise of “skin in the game” or “shareholder theory”. In saying that, it is incredibly difficult to manage bias and conflict of interest within any DAO, and so its an evolving process to align the incentives so that we find a good balance between those with more altruistic motives and those primarily seeking power or wealth.
There are many approaches to this – a more well know strategy is the use of Delegation and things like Fractal Voting as describe in Daniel Larimer’s book more equal animals. This has been an area of focus of mine for a long time now – if you’re interested, I shared a novel voting concept here that I believe strikes a good balance.
In my experience, most whales are also a projects biggest supporters (not purely by investment), but this is more aimed towards those that such technology threatens. We can not both assume that family banking dynasties are passive to the development of DeFi, whilst we pursue a world that makes them less relevant. Am digressing a bit here, but lastly I’ll say that its a good thing for team to remain anon/non-doxxed – it is for their own safety, and all the more reason why we need to both decentralized and automate many things to make finance 2.0 resilient and robust against those that seek its demise.