Well, during that time he was trying to pull out of the deal, when he was citing the bots as an argument of why he should be able to, he was using that as lever

Well, during that time he was trying to pull out of the deal, when he was citing the bots as an argument of why he should be able to, he was using that as leverage to try to get Twitter to agree to give him a discount: the idea being "I might be able to get out of this deal completely, but let me buy at a 20-30% discount instead and I'll go quietly." So it was kind of both an attempt to get out and an attempt to get a discount. The bot stuff was pretty transparently not a good faith argument from Musk; the real issue likely being more that the markets had gone down since the offer and what was already an overpay on day 1 was now a big overpay. The same dynamic made Twitter determined to keep the original offer: shareholders had basically demanded to take the offer to begin with, and with the down market (not to mention Musk himself publicly running the company down during his efforts to escape the deal) it was just that much more of a better deal than they could otherwise hope to get.