It is really the BEAM that is most compelling, Elixir is a great language on top of it, but the VM provides tools that simply don't exist in most other language

It is really the BEAM that is most compelling, Elixir is a great language on top of it, but the VM provides tools that simply don't exist in most other languages, if any. Specifically things like runtime tracing with pattern matching, the ability to connect an interactive remote shell to a running system and poke at it using code, ETS/Mnesia, hot upgrades/downgrades, etc.