Some might make money off their content through YT payouts or more likely sponsorships. Some might just have access to money (like rich parents, crippling debt, or a good day job you're not aware of). Some might have access to cheap second-hand equipment or equipment they can borrow. Some people just prioritize their work over things like cars.

I could speculate all day and never give you a satisfactory answer. Why not ask them? Drop a DM and see if they reply. Maybe they have some secret they can share. Content creators, especially the more niche ones are pretty likely to respond and be open about that kind of thing.

Looking at the Patreons alone for one channel I watch, he makes $38,000 a month. Just from Patreons. Which is $456,000 a year. That's before you get into YouTube ad revenue, sponsor spots and merchandising. This is a channel with less than 2 million subscribers. I suspect he makes 3-4 times that from the rest. So yes, $150K for equipment seems perfectly reasonable.

A lot of these channels start by using equipment from their job, or losing money on a youtube channel as a hobby while doing other work. If you already have/work at a wood shop, there isn’t a startup cost to use a lathe. If you work in a lab, you can often use tools when they aren’t being used for work projects.

The vast majority of youtube channels don’t make any money. The majority of channels that do make money don’t make enough to live off of. The few that do usually make most of their money from brand deals, donations, and merch.

This is just a guess but I think the Thought Emporium, which is probably the guy you watched for the neuron stuff, may also do these as actual research and publish papers about this and therefore gets funding from institutions or companies. It could also be he built it with money from other jobs or hot a loan to invest in this at the start then as the YT channel grew and people donated to him he expanded. Or maybe the lab is shared with others. Tbh idk but it's not as unreasonable as you think for a single person to own a lab like that.

3D printers and laser cutters are significantly cheaper now. Also those and CNC machines, people can use them for business like you send them the file and they ship you the item. Laser cutters people use for custom engraving, they just buy a bunch of blank keychains, coasters, etc off alibaba and make them on demand. You can find tons of these stores on etsy (people will just steal the models for popular characters and print them out on demand for a profit), here's a more expensive one. Or like my family, print out warhammer 40k models instead of buying them because it's literally cheaper.

Also these they might not have bought them new, like our university will rarely get rid of equipment to free up storage and because it's so specialized and so few people know how to get access, you can get a really good price. We had two rooms of printers that we had to get rid of because students kept breaking them and it was too much of a pain to keep them running. We also bought new milling equipment to upgrade the shop and got rid of the old stuff which was working fine.

I don't think of it as "how much does this person make". Each channel is a business, and the YouTuber is a business owner. The things they buy for videos are business expenses. Only part of the channel's income goes towards the YouTuber personally (like a salary). Some channels have actual employees they have to pay such as editors, event organizers, managers, which in turn work to make the channel bigger and earn more money.

If you think of them as businesses (companies), the fact that they're buying expensive equipment for their business makes much more sense.

How should I explain it? With a YouTube video

https://youtu.be/eoWcQUjNM8o

Don’t forget $600,000 for a destroyed Mclaren P1

Same place young privileged people traditionally get money from: their parents.

Now, instead of paying for film school or acting lessons, wealthy parents can now just finance their brood's YouTube channel.