The invention discloses a method for recovering valuable metals from waste lithium ion battery, which comprises the following steps: (1) pretreatment: separating positive and negative electrode powderfrom waste lithium ion battery; 2, leaching, and taking leach solution; 3) purification: adding alkali to that leach solution to adjust the pH value, and removing iron, aluminum and copper to obtainpurified solution; (4) Component control and evaporation concentration: adjusting the proportion of nickel, cobalt and manganese in the purified solution; then evaporating and concentrating, enrichingnickel, cobalt and manganese to set concentration to form precursor preparation liquid; 5) synthesis: passing the precursor preparation liquid, NaOH solution and ammonia water into a reaction kettle,controlling the pH value of the solution in the reaction kettle, carrying out reaction, and filtering after the reaction, wherein the filtered residue is the a ternary precursor. The leaching solution of the invention is purified, nickel cobalt manganese salt is supplemented, evaporated and concentrated, and the precipitant is added to directly synthesize the ternary precursor. The utility modelhas the advantages of short process flow, low consumption of raw materials, high recovery rate and high added value of products.