Last month, Elon Musk officially became the world’s richest man. Though it sounds like the plot of a decidedly down-market Bond flick, he’s now also the world’s most powerful space baron.

That’s according to a new analysis, which finds that the SpaceX CEO now controls more than 27 percent of all active satellites currently orbiting Earth — roughly one thousand out of 3,500. Musk’s stake is almost certain to get even bigger in the coming years, with physicist Alastair Isaacs estimating the share could grow to 50 percent as early as 2022 based on the number of launches currently associated with SpaceX. The greatest proportion of those launches are related to Starlink — an initiative the company says will bring “near global” high-speed internet coverage this year.

Given Musk’s well-established penchant for absurd and often cringeworthy self-promotion, this claim can probably be taken with a grain of salt. Just a few short years ago, after all, the billionaire was confidently telling a technology conference that he would begin sending rockets to Mars in 2018 and would be able to start colonization efforts within a decade. Pure hokum, as it usually turns out to be, Musk’s techno-utopian hype has nevertheless given him an image more like that of a Promethean creator than a garden-variety capitalist — more vanguard of humanity’s interstellar future than telecom monopolist in its present.