Or he's progressing far more than you do and you have actually no idea how much repair costs are when you actually put hundreds of wipes into a boss, for 12 bosses in a raid. Granted, guild bank should cover raid time repair bills, but still, progression raiding with consumables and repairs is actually quite a lot of gold.
Yeah, that's really fucking bizarre isn't it. They could just dedicate one extra shift to paying for their gametime and instead of working in game for 8 hours to pay off one month of gametime they could've just paid for the entire year or more depending on their salaries even on minimum wage.