The Elixir ecosystem is growing incredibly well. I am impressed both from an engineering and a product perspective.
It shows that they are playing the long game.
I think they are achieving what I wished happen to the Clojure ecosystem: productive, well designed, respected and popular. Clojure missed the last step, unfortunately.
It seems making a Lisp popular is an impossible task.
That said, I'm not sure if the data agrees with you. I think Clojure is more popular and widely used at this time. Not sure, but I think from what I remember of the few rankings, and just the fact I don't know an equivalent success story to NuBank for Elixir, I think maybe Clojure is at the moment more popular in practice.
But with the amazing learning material Elixir is putting out, maybe it won't last.
In terms of major companies using Elixir, Discord and Whatsapp are built with it. Whatsapp is slowly chipping away at its Elixir for infra homogeneity reasons with the rest of facebook but discord is still all aboard the Elixir train.
Neat, I didn't know about Discord. Whatsapp I thought it was all Erlang, are you sure about Elixir being prevalent there?
I wonder if it's only a few teams handling major events at Discord, or if that's truly their default backend service language all their backend teams uses. If so, maybe I should look at their job listings :p
As for whatsapp, they are mainly a erlang shop and yesterday they open sourced a type checker for erlang: