I was hunting around for an easy way to do this kind of math, and found https://www.sentencing.us/ . I haven't done an amazingly deep validation, but the math lines up with the above, and thankfully SBF has done a pretty good job stress testing the various clauses, so I'm going to be bookmarking it for the future.
Once you get to a 43 offense level, the guidelines sentence (its not really a range at that point), irrespective of criminal history category (guidelines sentence ranges are a result of a table cross-referencing offense level and criminal history category) is straight life.
If you do it in the order in the guidelines manual, the dollar loss is the first figure after the base offense for the offenses to which it applies, so (with a base of 7 for the wire fraud charge), you'd get to 37 with it alone. But if the tool does it in a different order, putting some of the other factors first, or you work a different charge first and its applying the grouping rules as you go, it would be very easy to hit 43 for SBF at the +30 for the dollar loss, and so get pegged to "life".
The actual aggregate statutory maximum for the offenses he's been convicted of (115 years) will limit the actual sentence though.
Yeah! It just didn't seem at the time like it was true, like maybe they linearly projected out the dollars or something. But no, from the guidelines doc, it looks very grim indeed for SBF.
It also makes the time gap between now and sentencing feel a bit performative. It doesn't make a ton of difference either way since he's managed to land himself in custody with the witness tampering antics, but it does mean that there's not much point in his lawyers quibbling over things like "how does the bankruptcy fit in" and "does blowing up your own company count as destroying a financial insitution, or is that intended for when you topple the victim of your crime", because even if we nix both those modifiers it just shifts him from "life plus cancer" to "life".
