I have also written Elixir in the last years, after 10 years of Ruby, and the syntactic similarities are obvious to me. Luckily you don't have to take my word for it, as the author of Elixir said multiple times that, while Elixir is not about syntax, its syntax was inspired by Ruby.

That is what I was getting at. Having people who came from the Ruby world and some very mild surface level bits is all that's there.

The issue I have with the statement is that it pulls all of the negative connotations that some people have with Ruby onto Elixir...and Elixir is not at all like Ruby.