In 2011, José Valim -- a long-time contributor to the Ruby community -- was looking for a way to improve the performance of his company's Rails application when he stumbled upon Erlang.
José was impressed by the Erlang Virtual Machine (a.k.a. BEAM), but felt that the language itself was missing some of the flexibility and constructs that he wanted. To tackle that, he built a brand new language on top of the Erlang VM and called it Elixir.