Tricks to avoid long meetings are different than figuring out how long a meeting will last.

Thus it instead being in response to the idea that meetings will expand to fill their schedule - if you don't solve that, then scheduling is that much less reliable.

If you have a project which will bankrupt the company if it fails, then it does not have a budget.

Yes it does; even if the budget is "100% of the company resources", that's still a constraint. Given that the odds of success probably drop drastically if you stop providing payroll, paying rent, etc., then it's constrained further. It might also be the case that spending (say) 10% of your resources elsewhere will double your profits on success, but you have a corresponding 10% chance of failure because of it.

90% chance of a major success vs 10% chance of bankruptcy is not necessarily a trivial decision.