Well, the risk is rather small - they accumulate HBD for $1 so the only expense is buying all outsiders' sell orders on Upbit at a premium. They are not buying those $1.5 HBD (SWAP.HBDs/pHBD/bHBD) after the race begins (unless they run out of stock and conditions are still favourable).
The principal gap of the story is not "Kim made money". HE probably did. OP's story is "Kim made money and we could not stop him, HBD pumps hurt Hive blockchain".
One gap is the lack of damage. A few hours of $1.3 HBD is not a damage so let's present a threat of a few hours of $0.7 HBD instead. I do not think there was a full-hearted attempt at disproving my claim the threat is phantom (elsewhere ITT).
The other gap is the no-arbitrage claim. If I wash trade HBDs at a local chess club and trick a few guys into buying high (cheating you out of your opportunity to arbitrage my ass), noone will even know. The movements on other HBD markets prove that there were arbitrageurs in the game as the mobsters surely did not need to restock right off the start.
I can understand the political POV - let's find an enemy (mobsters) and CTA the average Joe "Be a good Hivean, have HBD ready to defend our homeland." OTOH, I am not a good Hivean so I just enjoy a prime opportunity to either learn something new (if I am missing anything) or have fun ridiculing a full flock of parrots for their lack of critical thinking (in case I happen to be right).
The combination of pushing a low volume price index on CEXs to trigger AMM Pool is for sure a valid attack angle eventually.
Let's say I have 50k$/50k$ HBD/ShitcoinABC pooled and make the HBD spike 3x to increase my pool share in the ShitcoinABC 3x. I can now withdraw that Shitcoin before letting the HBD price drop dead again.
Does that make sense in a real-market scenario?