Colgate-Palmolive isn’t quite as old as the United States, but it’s close. The stable of household essential brands turned 220 this year. It’s one of the 10 longest publicly traded companies on the New York Stock Exchange, and it began major international operations in 1920. Currently, Colgate-Palmolive products are sold in more than 200 countries, with employees and operations in more than 100. Chief Growth Officer John Hazlin told me Colgate is the brand with the world’s highest household penetration—something that makes sense, he said, considering the vernacular term for toothpaste in some parts of the world is “Colgate.”

It takes such a long corporate history to make Hazlin’s career at the company sound short. He started with Colgate-Palmolive as an intern in 1996 and has been there ever since, working in marketing and management roles across the world and in different brand groups. For the last year, he’s served as chief growth officer, concentrating on the company’s strategic growth. I talked to him about his strategies and challenges to growth—especially at a company that is known around the globe. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

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Wednesday morning, Meta agreed to a $16.8 billion settlement to end a trial over litigation brought by 29 states claiming its social media sites were designed to addict children.

According to a statement from New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport, the settlement requires Meta to implement several safety features on both Facebook and Instagram, including daily two-hour time limits on the networks with automatic pauses after 15 minutes of continuous use, blocks on nighttime and school-time use, stronger safeguards against bullying and content about eating disorders and self harm, stronger parental controls, and restricted social comparison measures. In a press release on Wednesday, Meta called the settlement an “important step,” and called for TikTok and YouTube to commit to similar standards.

TikTok and its parent company ByteDance also settled litigation about children’s use of its platform last week. The short-form video social network agreed to pay $400 million to settle a lawsuit from the Justice Department that claims it illegally collected and kept children’s data without notifying their parents or receiving consent. The company was also accused of letting children create regular TikTok accounts—which are for users 13 and older—and being able to share videos and message with adults. The DOJ, which brought the suit in 2024, noted TikTok “has undergone significant changes to its ownership, management, compliance functions, and privacy practices”—notably the deal........

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