The Millionaire Who Left Wall Street to Become a Paramedic

The woman lay slumped in a subway stairwell, so Mr. Jonathan Kleisner knelt to look her in the eye. "We're here to help, OK?" he said. "Can you tell me what happened?"

- Christopher Maag

The woman, who had collapsed in a fit of tremors minutes before, opened her eyes. She regarded the man before her—lean, all-business attitude, blue uniform exuding some kind of authority—and sprang awake. She placed both feet on the ground and rose with barely a wobble, muttering that she was okay. Then she turned and started up the stairs, unaware that she was walking away from one of the best-trained paramedics in the country.

For Mr. Kleisner, 55, the case was not much of a challenge. But it was still better than his old job working on Wall Street.

"We get a lot of nothing calls like this," he said, after he and his partner had packed up their gear. "But our bread and butter is big stuff. I'm talking amputations, people hit by trains, bodies in pieces. Catastrophic stuff."

Mr. Kleisner's transition from millionaire commodities trader to rookie paramedic came 13 years ago, when he traded what he viewed as nihilistic self-enrichment for the mission of saving other people's lives.

By the time he abandoned Wall Street, he said, he was making millions of dollars a year. He was also miserable.

"I was a person who created nothing, gave nothing to anybody," he said of his time on Wall Street, where he ran his own investment fund. "Sometimes I feel like an outlaw who's trying to get to heaven. Or maybe a few good nights of sleep."

He could comfortably retire tomorrow to his cabin in the Catskills, where he goes fly fishing, reads novels and keeps bees. Instead, he remains a rescue paramedic, effectively subsidizing the Fire Department of New York, where his starting salary in 2012 was US$32,000. He now earns US$110,000 (S$141,000).

"People ask me, 'Why would you risk your life for US$18 an hour?'" he said.

The answer he gives is not so different from what he might have said as a Wall Street trader. "I am a hugely competitive person. I'm pretty good at what I do."