For LeBron haters, it was a story nearly too sweet for consumption.

Heat star LeBron James, celebrated in Miami but viewed elsewhere as an entitled, out-of-touch egomaniac, supposedly requested an ornate cake for free to serve at his New Year’s Eve/birthday party at the Shelborne Hotel in South Beach. That night, the story goes, LeBron rejected the cake for another. Cake maker crushed. LeBron indifferent to her pain.

Here’s the rub: It didn’t really go down that way. The baking job was actually double-booked by the Shelborne, and James — who never even saw the rejected cake — was presented with the one his people had wanted all along. But online fire-breathers didn’t care much for the details, so James spent much of the past week once again skewered as a pampered, childish celebrity.

There was a deeper undercurrent beneath the vitriol: Why is King James, one of the richest people in town, getting a cake for nothing when he could buy his own bakery 100 times over?

“It’s upsetting, because those who can’t afford it can’t get a cupcake for free,” said Alethea Hickman, the Boca Raton-based pastry chef whose uneaten cake — which she says was worth $3,000 — ended up in the Shelborne trash bin New Year’s morning. “It’s not right, but it’s a cold business decision,” she said of her cake donation. “They are beneficial to my business.”

It has long been a cliché that the richer you are, the less you pay. But in the world of celebrities, it’s more like this: The more famous you are, the more swag you get.

From bottles of booze to luxury cars, many companies dedicate large portions of their budgets to shower stars with gifts. And it isn’t simply a matter of trying to buy a cover boy or girl’s affections (although that certainly could be a secondary motive).

Rather, it’s a coordinated, longstanding marketing strategy based on this premise: People think that if Ciroc vodka is good enough for P. Diddy, it’s good enough for me.

“It’s a billion-dollar industry now,” said Elliott Stares, who runs an international PR firm out of Miami. “There are companies in New York and L.A. that focus solely on getting products into the hands of celebrities.”

It’s an incestuous game played among attention-starved corporations, marketing outfits, movie stars and athletes and a compliant media, who gladly give a product free publicity — so long as their photographer gets the perfect picture on the red carpet.

And while most everyone in the celebrity milieu has his or her hand out, the phenomenon is particularly egregious here in Miami.

Need examples? Maybe you’ll remember these:

• Heat guard Dwyane Wade’s court vision is legendary, and he has a complementary Lasik eye procedure to thank. Wade is among a handful of stars to get free vision correction surgery at Millennium Laser Eye Center in Sunrise, in exchange for a few words of praise.

• Rocker Lenny Kravitz didn’t need to worry about picking up a couple of six-packs when he threw a party at a Star Island home in 2005. Heineken sponsored the event, and made sure everyone had a beer (or 10).

• The Dolphins made a splash by bringing in the Williams sisters and pre-divorce power couple Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony as “minority owners.” While the specifics of the deal weren’t made public, it’s believed that the stars paid little, if anything, for their stakes.