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You forgot:

- good marketing

And that's not a bad thing -- it means the core team and users of the language are excited about it, which can be a good thing.

There are no big companies behind Elixir so the marketing is pretty much a community thing done by people who like the language.

Discord is using Elixir, and is pretty large.

In another thread, their CTO claimed they have more users than Slack.

There are big companies using Elixir; I think what qaq meant is that Elixir isn't itself developed by a big company.