Elastic as in AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (ec2). Flexible virtual machines provisioned with a web API not rubbery stretchy servers

By that metric even VMware's vSphere with its abominable excuses for APIs also count as elastic.

If you have to manage the hardware yourself, have to plan and pay for upfront for the maximum capacity you would need, and there are fixed limits you can hit and have to plan around yourself, it's not elastic.