I don't get why people think Elixir is like Ruby. Other than some syntactic similarities, I can't think of any substantial similarities.
The creators of elixir were rubyists. As someone who used to Ruby and now Elixirs, a lot of the joy of the platform (relevant to gp's comment) has made it over. Elixir is legitimately as fun to program in as Ruby, if not more so. I think that the developers of elixir care about the user experience in a way that basically no other language seems to.
I could of course be biased because before Ruby I used to program in an actor-like C++ framework, so everything just feels like I'm coming home to a home I never knew existed to me.
They do have some major fundamental differences though and I think the similarity is often overstated.
Phoenix doesn’t have a magical asset pipeline, it doesn’t have a whole library of language extensions a la ActiveSupport, it doesn’t represent dB rows as objects. Those are just a few things off the top of my head.
Additionally all requests to an app running Phoenix/Cowboy/Plug are separate processes and can happen in parallel without having to stand up multiple app instances.