According to this Polygon article:
If his older sister hadn’t intervened, Jason’s son would have been forced to sell off those Void Opals for far less than their fair market value. Other players would then export those commodities to another system, profiting from his work. Making matters worse, Jason’s son would have been trapped in that mining system, stranded more than 800 light-years from the populous center of the in-game galaxy. There would have been no way back other than to self-destruct his new starship and effectively begin Elite’s grind all over again.
...
To get their side of the story, I hopped into the perpetrators’ Discord channel. (Elite’s code of conduct prohibits naming and shaming of other players, so I’ll not be revealing the name of the server or of the individuals that I encountered there. But to put things into context, know that the server itself is named after one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite Panzer divisions.) What I found, even in the entry lobby, was a small community comfortable with heinous racial slurs and harassment