Often case that isn't the wrong way to go. Newer doesn't mean better, and there's always trade-offs to consider. "It's newer" by itself really shouldn't be much of a consideration.
But in this concrete case his point is valid, I'd likewise expect Erlang's BEAM to outperform node.js in concurrency any day of the week. Elixir being new is fairly irrelevant because it compiles down to the same erlang BYTE CODE. Erlang is 30 years old.