As far as I know, the release of bitcoin was a fair one, that means that everyone was free to mine it (so not secretly mined) and add contributions into the code.

Satoshi released it in some sort of forum/mailing list for people to look at, but of course, nobody gave a fuck back then, which is why the few that got interested since the begining are not multi millionaires.

I wonder who the first 10 people ever to own bitcoin were.

1 must be satoshi, 2 must be Hal Finney.. not sure about the rest??