From various posts in the forum I have read that ~7bln XEM were distributed between 1500 accounts. What I have not found is:
- how these accounts were selected?
- who control these accounts?
That was the initial distribtuion. Similar to an ICO.
All the accounts were selected by people showing their interest, and paying a small fee. You can see how the process went, the bitcointalk threads still exist:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=422129.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=440185.0