I don't see Elixir being the future, or ever killing Erlang entirely. I do prefer Erlang's syntax to Elixir's too (along with a bunch of other stuff).

I expect what is going to be more of a dynamic where Elixir will grab a bunch of new developers, some of which will go to the Erlang side of thing eventually, whereas Elixir had its jumpstart by draining some of the Erlang developers who were unhappy with the language.

If Elixir does catch on, it could have a spectacular rise, but I'd only expect it to trickle more people into Erlang, which already had its newcomer wave many years ago and has stabilized since then.

Is that so, or is that old wives tales? Because in most "layered" languages, you can go quite far without understanding the base language, as long as you understand the semantics of the higher level language.

I don't need to know Java to write Scala for example -- I just need to know the relevant semantics of Scala's object system and interoperability.

The semantics of Elixir are a superset of the semantics of Erlang, so by learning the former, you're learning the latter anyway. Plus, you'll be calling a lot of Erlang libraries from Elixir, so understanding how Erlang works is extremely beneficial to using Elixir.